Create an Invoice in Google Docs for Planning with Ease

Create an invoice in google docs for Planning

hey everyone Brian Manning again with another payments related tutorial on creating invoices and today I'm going to show you how to get some free invoice templates this time from Google Docs I'm going to show you how to find this template and this one and save it to your Google account so you can use it as your own template plus I'm going to show you how to add a payment link button and give you some cell references that are helpful for really anyone who's using Google Sheets so I'll link to the templates that I go over in this video in the video descript description below and finally I'm going to also show you how to customize these templates and publish or save them so you can send them out to your clients and customers based on what's right for you so you'll start off by opening a new browser and just searching for Google Docs invoice template it'll bring up a search result that should be something similar to this but it's simply docs.google.com SL templates and it'll open up a an interface that'll look like this and if this comes up for you this is actually the old template library and you can see right here that Google gives you a notification that this is going away soon so if this shows up you can use these templates just by clicking on the use this template button and you can also preview them if you'd like you can click on these and store them to your Google Drive and I'll show you how to do that in just a second but all of these templates are available in the marketplace for you and that way you know you can modify them and change them as you'd like and again I'll show you how to do that in just a second so what we're going to do is we're going to go into the sheets Tab and just click on this button here and it'll open up this new template library and then you can scroll right down here and you'll see an invoice option and just click right here and it's going to open up a a standard template invoice that you can take and use and so what I've done is I've already downloaded this and added it to my Google Drive in order to make best use of these templates you're going to want to have a Gmail account and of course it's free to sign up so just sign for a Gmail account if you don't have one yet and what you'll do is just click on this icon right here and go to drive it'll open up your drive folder and everybody gets one of these by default with a free Gmail account and this is where all of your documents are stored so this is the standard template it it this is the off-the-shelf version and I have downloaded this template already and made some modifications to it and so I'll pull that up here right now and just show you how to change this around and customize it the way that you want to have it so this template has automatically removed the the cell guidelines from the background and if you want those to show up while you're changing the layout you can highlight everything and come up to the view Tab and click the grid lines and you'll notice that they show back up so if you want to move you know move some cell references around or or move some of the items around you can do that so a lot of the fields here are pretty self-explanatory and you just need to come come in and customize them and you can put your customer's name invoice number project name and the due date obviously you can invoice to the person right here and I've already filled my name in and then submitted on Dat again very very uh simple and straightforward so if you want to add your logo you just click in a Cell reference here click insert and then the image folder will come up you can pull in your logo it'll upload and add it to the document okay then you can click on it and hover over and hold and click and and resize this as as you see fit so I'll just leave it right there and maybe I'll make this a little bit smaller here okay so I got my logo on there I'll I'll fill out my my information right here you you can customize it obviously as you see fit and then we'll come down and add some references here so by default they got some pre-populated fields in here and let's just say you have consult services and you have a website project okay you can change to quantities let's change them to one each and then unit price we'll just adjust those then we're going to add a sell reference and we want this to total so that the quantity and the unit price add up correctly and if I hover in this cell and I look at the product I look at the cell reference right here um it is adding this these two Fields the unit price and the quantity automatically so if I change this to two you'll notice that it populates to $1,000 and it also changes the the grand total down here at the bottom so you can configure that however you'd like and if you're not using these other fields you can just zero them out or delete them completely the adjustments tab you can rename if you want if if you have shipping and handling or just an other column I'll just label it is an other field and we're not going to use that for this example so I'm just going to zero it out and leave it blank so we have our totals here uh 1,000 plus 100 and it's totaling at 1100 right here so that's how you modify this if if I go back to the original template you can see that there's nothing in here but just a notes section so in my template I've added a couple of references here that I'm going to go over with you so because this is a spreadsheet it accepts cell references and what I have here are a couple of images that are clickable and if I hover over this button the pay now button and come up here you can see the cell reference that is held within that cell so it is a hyperlink and what this is doing is it's image it's any image that's inserted into this cell and you can change it to make it whatever you would like the image location is right here now in this template which again I'll make available a to you you can use this pay now button if you would like the hyperlink which is the link location is right here so obviously you can change that out to whatever you'd like so that's the pay now button and this Google icon works exactly the same way and these references are available out there online through the Google resources so it's where I got them so I just wanted to show you that these are two images that have the same reference but obviously it's displaying two different images and I'm going to leave them there for right now but when I go to save this before it would be sent out to a client or customer I'm going to delete one of these buttons and just use one of them the third option is a simple link text the easiest way to do the link is just to click on an open cell and then come right up here to the link option and click on it and it's going to display a link and a text so if I wanted to type in this example to pay this invoice click here then I can just click right here and type in the hyperlink of of where I want to send somebody uh to pay this invoice and click apply this is now a clickable link and you can see it pops pops up when you hover over this this is just a text field so now you can adjust it you can if you want to increase the font you can if you want to make it bold or italics or change the color the background color you can customize it to whatever you would like so let's assume we have our invoice configured the way that we want it to be the last thing that I'm going to do before I save this or publish it is to get rid of these grid lines again by just going to view and grid lines and unchecking and then all of that goes away okay so before I download this I'm going to delete out these buttons so I'm only giving my customer one option and I'm just going to type in here uh to pay this invoice click here and I'll leave everything else and I'm just going to leave that link right there you you get how it's a hyperlink so we'll go to file download and PDF and what it's going to do is uh I'll click export here and it's going to save it to my hard drive and I'm going to click on this and it brings it up in PDF format so on a side by side here you can see that this is the Google sheets version and this is the pdf version and if I come down here with my mouse and I hover over to pay this invoice click here if I click on it it's going to bring up a new web browser and it's going to bring up my hosted payment page service which in this case is simply pay. me so that's the simple process of saving to PDF then obviously you can just attach that to your email you can send it off your customer can open the PDF they can click on the payment link and they can get get the invoice paid so another option to publish this is to come up to file and click publish to the web these options give you the ability to publish this doc document and make it open make it available to everyone or anybody who has the link you may or may not use that uh I don't personally use that option but it is available to you the last option that I'll go over with you is that you can simply save this to your drive folder your Google drive folder so if I wanted to just drag one of these in from my Windows browser copy it here it shows up and there's and I if I double click on it you can see that it pulls this uh this invoice up with the clickable link now with Google Docs the way that it works is that you can rightclick on this and you can get a sharable link and you make sure to turn it on if it doesn't automatically turn on and you can click on this copy it to your clipboard and then you can email this link out and if I just open another browser and P past and I enter you can see that this invoice comes right up so again you could email that simple link out to your customer or your client they can come down here click on the uh the link and then it opens up that payment page so there's a couple different options there's basically three different options that you can use and obviously once you get the the template stored or or configured the way that you want it for your company you can save the template come into your Google Drive and just store these and then obviously you can come down and uh remove them or change them or simply rename them specific to the customer the client or the invoice number that you're using so here's the second version and this is a recreation of an Excel template that I've used in other videos and I'll link up to that video in the description if you'd prefer to use uh Excel or you'd like to use Excel in addition to Google Docs everything works the exact same way you can customize and modify this the way that you would like uh it's got the same links right down here so again if you want to delete these buttons uh you just click in the cell click delete and they'll go away and then you can leave it with with just the text based link which I do think is the easiest option and it's also probably the most reliable option when it comes to inserting images and attaching hyperlinks so again you just click in an open cell and click on that link option and it brings right up for you so you can link to any web-based payment Service uh or any payment link that your customers can use to to make the payment and settle up on this invoice all the other fields you can just customize with your information and the customer's information and then the cell references work exactly the same way so this template has a few more options with regard to quantity unit this is a code that can be specific to an item number or if you're not going to use it you can just completely delete it the unit price is a standard field and then this totals column again is going to reference by typing equals unit price and then hit the asterisk for star and then come over and click on the quantity so that it multiplies the unit price times the number of uh times the quantity so if I change this to five you'll see that this number changes now with this template this reference right up here at the Top If I click in here you can see that this is simply referencing cell G40 which is our totals column down here so it's just a design element all this does is it takes whatever total is listed down at the bottom of the invoice and it makes it exactly the same so if you'll notice if I click in here and just change this to 2,000 for example or I guess I should change the unit price you can see that now I deleted that cell reference so I'll have to add that back in or I can just click and drag down and then that cell reference will be in there if I change this to 5,000 it's updating as I add new numbers or new Fields so those are the two templates again I'll link up to both of these this one again is available on the Google marketplace so you can download this one for free this one is customized from Excel template so I'll give you the link to it you can click on the link and then you can download it and save it to your drive so again when you get that that link that I I just showed you you can just save it to your drive and you do so by just clicking on file and there will be an option here that'll say add to drive now this one's already in my drive so I'm not getting that but it'll give you that ability to save it and then it'll just show up right here so that's how to configure both invoice templates with Google Sheets if you found this video helpful Please Subscribe give it a thumbs up and leave a comment with a question again the references in video are all Linked In the description I publish weekly tutorial Style videos on the topics of making the process of collecting payments simple and efficient topics include Merchant accounts payment page Builders software tools and workflows that tie them all together until next time I'm Brian Manning and I'll see you soon