Collaborate on Freelance Graphic Designer Invoice for Operations with Ease Using airSlate SignNow

Freelance graphic designer invoice for Operations

all right let's talk about the tools that you need to actually execute on your work and get stuff done the first thing I want to talk about is a template that's called estimate versus actuals and this has basically two purposes so the first one is before you make a proposal to a client you'll need to estimate the cost on your end and we talked about this a little bit when we talked about pricing you need to know your costs right you are at the end of the day selling both your time and perhaps other people's time if you're going to hire somebody or if you're going to buy some asset such as stock photography phones or something like this so you have your own costs that you need to calculate doesn't mean that that's going to be the price of the project but you need to know your bottom bar now aft so we want to calculate that so going back here into the template business processes docs I do have here one that's called estimate versus actuals and here's how this thing works and how you can use this basically it's a table and these table list your tasks or expenses so let's imagine in this imaginary project that you're going to have you're going to do some strategy and you're going to do some art Direction and you're going to basically you're right here the steps of the project the project now here I'm going to do this in let's say I've calculated my hourly rate when we talked about pricing and I know that I need to make 250 dollars an hour to make sure that I that's my break even rate so if I do these tasks and I estimate that the strategy is going to take me three hours our Direction five hours and design three hours again this is just random numbers and also I'll need to buy a photo right so this is not really ours it's quantity of one and the image is going to cost me fifty dollars that sums up my expenses at least my estimate of expenses at two thousand eight hundred dollars okay so that's kind of helps me out as a starting point now what I did here is I've did twenty percent buffer to this price because we're always wrong with our estimates so after I've kind of filled in these assumptions that I have about the project I'll get this big number which is basically my bottom bar for the project okay now here's so this is step one when you're pricing a project you're going to use this estimate tool to understand what's your bottom bar is now here's when it gets interesting you let's say I've negotiated and I've actually ended up charging four thousand five hundred dollar as my final price okay now when the project is over and I tracked my time which is something that we'll talk about in the upcoming video I'm going to come here and I'm Gonna Fill in the actual hours that I ended up working because I want to know what's what was the real cost and how different was it right was my estimate even good so let's say that instead of three hours the strategy actually took me five hours but our Direction instead of taking me five hours let's say it also actually took five hours and then design actually took me two hours and I had to end up and buy two photos so that cost me a hundred dollars so while I thought this is going to cost me two thousand eight hundred dollars it ended up actually costing me three thousand one hundred now it's a good thing that we added the buffer but here's the interesting thing now I can run the calculation of understanding how many hours I ended up working and calculate that based on the final price and understand that the actual hourly rate that I made on this project ended up being 321 so more than I actually wanted which means that I have some profit here beyond the cost right this is the cost I pay myself a fixed salary okay so this is what I need to pay myself a salary but I've made some profit beyond that so that's really very quickly helps you to understand this even estimate before the project and understand how you performed and estimated after the project now the way that I would use this is I would go ahead and duplicate this every time because says if you want to save the stats of previous projects you don't want to replace the data every time you want to have this as a memory so that in three months when you'll have to you know estimate a new web design project you can say hey let's go back to the project I did a few months ago and see what I estimated there and what actually happened and this will kind of inform you to make better estimates so when you duplicate you'll see that you can duplicate the data so that these tables are not connected so just make sure you click duplicate the data I'm going to undo what I did right now I'm going to delete this but just make sure that you duplicate the data all right so this is how you're going to use estimates versus actuals the next thing I want to talk about is proposals so let's get started and I want to show you a real proposal of mine this is a proposal for our client of mine that's called Lucia we actually talked about them I showed your their project on their product earlier so this is the proposal for their marketing website and design system I want to show you how this is built and then you know what actually let's get started by giving you an overview of how my proposals look like so we can go here into the proposal template and this is basically the structure for all of my proposals and you can copy and paste it from here I start with an overview where I just summarize what we talked about in the meeting and what are the basically the goals that they're trying to achieve with this project usually I would if this is a new client I would add something like why work with us and I'll customize this based on my values or experience relevant to the client in this Lucia case because I knew the client before I didn't had the need to add this but sometimes it's very useful then I would describe the process and the cost so this is Phase One this is what you're going to get as deliverables in phase one here's the deadline for phase one and here's what this costs and then I would detail the terms and usually usually I would have these very basic terms on this on every proposal and these are 50 down payment before the work and then usually depending on the project of course but it usually would be something like 25 after I present the design and 25 after the final deliveries have been sent so either we finalize the design or maybe we developed the website or something like this sometimes depending on the project this might be breaked differently if the project is more complicated but this is kind of like the basic one I also always mentioned that the prices do not include font licensing or images as required now this is basic this is I even though I write this here usually usually as as you can see here I usually do take them into account because usually I provide you know I create the assets creating the assets specifically on websites is usually part of the USD part of The Proposal however sometimes I do like to mention this because sometimes they would pick something that is very expensive and then and that was not included in the the website right if they want to have a very special font and use it on an app or a website with a lot of traffic these things can be very very expensive and font licensing usually is actually a recurring price if you're using it for font embedment and so I don't want to take ownership on these things so I mention it right here usually I include three rounds of iteration and after that an hourly rate so this is of course in new Israeli shekel so you'll probably want to customize this but the purpose of this is to give in high hourly rate so that they'll be motivated not to get to this point not to get to Beyond three rounds rounds of iterations or revisions right so they'll want to push everything that they need Within These revisions and then try to avoid this so it's high on purpose um for me specifically I mentioned that the price do not include vat depending on where you are or um where they're paying from so of course you may not need this term I always say that the payment is due 10 days after the invoice is sent so it's not like something like net 30 when they can pay me in in two months or something and the last thing is that the intellectual ownership of the design will be transferred only after the final payment so basically what that means is that if the project for some reason did not end and they did not pay the final payment one they can't really use it or second of all I can do whatever I want because I own the intellectual ownership of the project so though that's the basic template for the proposal let's see how it looks in real life so Lucia marketing website and design system Lucia is looking to upgrade its marketing website and total brand visibility to look bigger and better create more trust and confidence with its customer increased signup you see here that we're talking about the gold right not just need to new website right it talks about trust talks about conversion sign ups while adding a new product offering messages needs to be clear and straightforward and keep High conversion rate so the phases are first of all we're going to work on the marketing website in brand we'll start by strategizing content architecture for all marketing website in parallel we'll explore different visual language and choose a direction after approving wireframes and visual direction will design a new site so the deliverables bolts will be new responsive web design updated brand assets design system for further use and work in collaboration with developers with their developers because they wanted to develop their own website it's going to take about 11 weeks and it's going to be 80 000 new Israeli shekels which is about 20 something US Dollars 20 something thousand US Dollars phase two is a product update this is something shorter but you can see it basically follows the same structure and then the last one it's kind of marketing assets so here it was basically just giving them templates of optional things right if you want an email template it's 1 000 new Israeli shekels per one if you want one two three just let me know how much you want them so this is just a little bit of a different just because these are kind of like optional things right and I also try to optionally sell them on development but they they didn't buy it and uh you can see that the terms here are pretty much the same that I what I just showed you so I create this template within InDesign just to you know lay it out nicer but it doesn't really matter this can be a Google doc with your logo or whatever you want you don't need a fancy system for this I mean you know I've built Prospero which is a proposal system so I know that it can be helpful but I'm just telling you you don't have to do anything crazy you can use any layout tool and I'll give you the template for this proposal in InDesign below this video now the next thing that you want to do is you want to use something like hello sign where you can drop in that PDF you can drop in places for Signature and they can sign that proposal online and this is a tool that I use for free actually this is really great and it's and it's free so again this is what I use for online signature all right so this is proposals the next thing is invoicing now it's hard for me to give advice about invoicing just because this really changed depends on where you live and you what I will say is that it's probably a good idea to use some kind of an invoicing software versus is in some places it's legal and possible to create your own invoicing in in Google doc or something like that and it's valid I'm based in Israel so here this is just completely illegal and you have to work with kind of a recognized invoicing system but depends on where you are it might be a possibility however I do think that it's really great to work within a software like this that will enable you to see kind of Trends and visualize the data um pretty easily right we're going to track the you know p l and and the financials but it's really good if your invoicing system also kind of show you kind of Trends and the graphs and see what what was paid and whatnot so I recommend I think I work with the US software that was fresh books so I think it's good I don't want to you know no affiliation with with any of these and I'm using something local here in Israel so I don't want to make recommendations but I think it looks good though I recommend you find something to work with now the last thing I want to talk about in terms of execution is how to manage projects so my tool of choice in this case is usually Trello and this is Trello Trello is also a free tool that is highly customizable and it's very easy for clients to understand what's going on the way that it works is that you can create these kind of columns and then you have what's called cards that you can write your tasks or where you are right now and each one of these cards can have a checklist and you can have here discussion in the comments so they can see basically visually what you're working on you can tell them hey I finished this task please review it and once they approve it they move it here to done so this is kind of a collaborative way to see what are you working on right now you can also prioritize and say Hey you know if this is really important bring this to the top now the reason that I use this first of all they are always knowing what I'm working on and it's really easy to collaborate here in the comments instead of losing tracks now when this get really useful is after you send the design and they're start sending in the revisions if you do this on email you're going to have thousands of emails you know threads and things are going to get lost and if you keep track of it on a Trello board like this it's going to be much much cleaner and a better experience for all of them so again this is a free tool and you can invite them here you can see that I've invited my clients to collaborate on this board with me so it's really really helpful and great tool to use