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Freelance writer invoice for Customer Support

you've got brand-new client and you are so excited to get started as a virtual assistant you can't wait to jump in well mama I'm really excited for YouTube but I want to make sure that you know exactly what's going to happen when it comes time to get paid are you all set up to advise your client if you're not don't worry because by the end of this episode every moment TV you'll have everything you need to send out that invoice and get paid Plus at the end of this video I'll tell you how to get your hands on an amazing resource to make sure your business is set up for success from day one so be sure to stick around I'm Lauren golden here with a new episode of free mama TV showing moms like you how to start and run a successful freelancing business from home subscribe to my channel and hit the bell to be notified when I post a new episode of free mama TV right here every Tuesday it is so exciting when you land your first client you do all this prep work before the discovery call you get through the call it goes well you write the proposal and the client says yes it's awesome and all you want to do is celebrate I am totally in favor of all of that celebration but I also want you to spend a couple of minutes making sure you have all the right systems in place to get paid for all of your hard work so before I walk you through everything you need to know I have a question for you have you ever sent an invoice to a client before let me know in the comments below know before you can send an invoice to your client you have to know how much you're charging and that means you'll need to talk to your client about money so let's talk about best practices first of all the money conversation is one you should have as early as possible in the process that way you're not spending a ton of time on discovery calls and writing up proposals old lady here oh I can't afford that you should definitely have some sort of range in mind so that you can weed out the tire kickers from the beginning if you can tell potential clients most of my projects are around $800 to $1,200 a month you're not gonna waste time on someone who is hoping to hire you for a $50 one-off once you've established that you're at least reading from the same book then it's time to make sure you're on the same page your projects will either be billed hourly or by the project I generally recommend that you move to project based pricing as soon as possible but some projects are going to fall into that hourly charge bucket for example if you genuinely have no idea how long it takes to do something or the scope of the project keeps changing it may make sense for you to be billing hourly and I'll show you how to do that in just a moment another important part of the money conversation is when you'll build the client when the money is due and how you'll be paid let's say you send out an invoice on the first of the month in your mind you've sent that invoice and you expect to be paid but if you've never discussed this with your client she may have different ideas for example she may pay all of her bills on the 15th when her bookkeeper is in the office or she may be used to having a 30 day grace period for invoices so all of a sudden on the 15th you get a payment and then you email your client say hey you were two weeks late paying my invoice so the work is only starting now and we have to push the deadline back by two weeks the client will be furious she had no idea you weren't getting started and from her standpoint she may have just paid you two weeks early you need to be clear on your terms and you need to talk about those terms with your client do you charge in advance for work that's going to be done or after the project is complete what's your plan for when an invoice isn't paid on time will you charge a late fee how much and will you enforce it you have to be super comfortable talking about your money so practice ahead of time if you need to now once you know what your terms are you'll need to invoice ingly if you're invoicing an hourly project you'll need to track your hours so that you can bill your client accurately a great tool for tracking hourly projects is toggle here's a quick overview so this is the toggle interface you can use it a variety of different ways but this is how you would access it through a browser inside of your window and when you're ready to start a project for a client you can come over here to this little file tab folder right here and you can actually create a new project that you're working on I would be working on this for my client named Jenna so this is the workspace that I'm within I would add a client right here so it's working for her brand which is right here or of course when you're new you can go in and your new clients so that you can actually filter your reports by your client name if you're working with more than one client at a time and then you can actually name the project that you're working on so let's say you're working on customer service emails and again this the word we're in this particular workspace and we want to add our client we want to add our client oops named Jenna so we're gonna add that way all that is tracking we're gonna create this project right here it's what we're working on um we can add some specific notes if we love that you can see right here that it's already tags to this client in this particular project and let's just say beating out inbox is what we're working on and then you just go ahead and hit enter or you can push play over here and as you can see it starts this little timer so then you'd be able to open up another browser inside of your window or you could even minimize this and start a new one and start the work that you're actually working on as soon as you're done with that project you just come over here and click stop and you can see that when you do that it's actually going to create a a log of the work that you've been doing at a particular week at the end of the week you can come over to your dashboard and it will give you your entire team's activity for the last seven days you can see that Lauren was the team member claiming out inbox for customer service emails for client genesis at 16 a whopping 16 seconds on it and then you can actually go to your reports at the end of the week as well you have the ability to download your your reporting for the week and as well as your insights and so you can actually attach those to your invoices if that's something that your client wants to validate is the time that you were working on some certain projects so as you can see it's super easy to use the hardest thing is just reminding yourself to do it so I recommend time blocking in Google Calendar and getting yourself that reminder before you start sitting down to work on a project to start that toggle timer then when it's time to end voice your client you'll simply check your toggle report and copy that information into an invoice so let's take a look at some options for those invoices the good news is that creating an invoice is very simple if you have a PayPal account you actually have a totally free invoicing tool built right into it here's how to create and send an invoice to a quiet unless and two minutes okay so when you log into your business PayPal dashboard you're going to go to tools and then invoicing once you get here you are actually going to create an waist and you can see that now there is actually the ability to create monthly invoices that go out on a schedule so that it's not something you have to set up me and you late every month so this is something a feature that I really recommend for anybody once they graduate to having monthly retainer clients that makes it super easy you set it and forget it and it's it's a lot easier than going in and manually doing all of your invoicing so you're gonna click this create invoice button right here and you're going to choose between invoice estimate batch invoice upload and money request for your client purposes you're most likely going to be using the invoice feature itself and you can see when you get in here you have a couple options so you can determine again how often this is going to go out with your frequency you can actually categorize your invoice numbers so if this is something you're tracking you know through QuickBooks or something like that or maybe you have an inventory of something that you're keeping track of or if you're using multiple invoicing software programs and you want to be able to track them through your accounting software you can manually include the invoice number otherwise it'll assign the number based on the number of invoices you've sent directly through this platform the invoice date and of course the due date this is super important as we discussed it's important that you have this this conversation with your clients in advance so that you know what is appropriate is it doing 15 days is it you want receipt is it you in 30 days what's your window um typically do on receipt but of course that's up to you and your your clients to figure out directly you have the ability to customize your invoices even right you're inside PayPal so you can actually upload your business logo and then up here you can create different templates so you can do it based on hours you can do it based on quantity which is what it defaults to or goods you can actually go to amount only as well and so in the amounts only would be what a lot of people end up using for freelancing purposes because you're gonna write the description of the services as well as that total amount that that is owed or of course you can use the hourly template where when you come down here it gives you ability to set your rate that you agreed upon the hours as well as the description of your services it will show it spelled out to them of Cour if there is any servant discount or anything like that allowing partial payment all of these are things that you have the ability to customize the hid the invoicing feature of PayPal and I always like adding a note to the recipient and any terms and conditions again this is if you have any policies in place if payments are not due on time are you going to enforce them what are they and make sure you're clearly communicating with them and of course down here at the bottom you have the ability to attach files so if you are billing hourly if you're tracking your hours using a software programs such as toggle you can actually upload that tracker by a weekly or monthly report directly here into your invoice before going ahead and sending it directly to your client remember when you're sending an invoice through PayPal for a service you've provided you're going to be charged to B this is totally normal and it's part of the cost of doing business on mine these are merchant processing fees and they are business deduction so don't try to avoid the fee if PayPal finds out they will shut down your account stripe is another payment processor like PayPal it's free to set up an account that will let you take credit card payments online and just like PayPal and you'll be charged two processing fee in fact that these are identical here's how to send an invoice using stripe okay here is the stripe dashboard and in order to send an invoice from this platform area click on Billy and then invoices you're gonna come up right here to this plus sign in the corner and click on new and here is your template right there and easy to use so you're going to add your customer or find an existing customer inside of your stripe dashboard you are going to include the items the quantity in the price right here easy to do again much like the PayPal platform you have the ability to add a memo so this could be any terms and conditions any other factors contributing to the payment that you guys establish in advance as well as some gratitude for the clients business because they didn't have to choose you so I always recommend plugging some stuff in there because it makes it super beneficial to your ongoing relationship and again much like PayPal has the option to do ongoing billing or invoicing you have the ability to automatically charge any payment methods that are kept on file so it makes more sense for your client to save time every single month for a rotator long term retainer client you can actually get their credit card on file and build them on a set day every month you can also email invoices can be sent me annually every single but that are customized to the things you're doing you can add custom fields you can add notes down below as well so and before you go ahead and click that sim invoice button make sure you click the three dots so that you can view your invoice settings if you don't have your template set up already again like PayPal you have the ability to brand your invoices with your color and logo so that it can look customized to you and your business making you look like the professional that you are you can update all of your own contact information as well and here is where you would establish those payment terms in terms of when that invoice is due you have the ability to include a strike posted links you invoice so that people can have control over managing the invoice that you send so it gives them the ability to download and see the status of their invoice so it's it's it would give them their own dashboard versus just going inside of the email itself and paying it lastly something that strike allows you to do or your clients to do for that matter is to pay as an ACH bank transfer meaning rather than including that credit card information they can actually go ahead and clewd their bank information for an ACH transfer which is gonna help eliminate some of those transaction fees that are being passed along to you I just it is you have these settings saved you're gonna want to hit save and then of course you can head back to that email template that you're at before make sure it's all good to go and send that invoice and it's as easy as that if you're already using accounting software like QuickBooks or wave in your business then you can send invoices directly from there as well your processing fees using QuickBooks are slightly lower than using PayPal or stripe but you do pay a monthly fee to use QuickBooks with waive you'll pay the same processing fees you would to stripe or PayPal with no additional fees for use in their service again these are business decisions you'll need to make these fees are a small price to pay in exchange for allowing customers to pay you online by credit card giving you nearly instant access to your money now that you've got your invoicing settled I've got another resource you're going Toit to get your hands on it's the freedom of a guy discreetly have everything you need to get your business started and making money you can find a link to the frame of a guide down below this video also if you want to join a community of Mama's just like you I have a Facebook group where thousands of us come together with support and action taking tips and motivation as always if you liked this video please let me know by liking it below subscribe and share it with your fellow mamma's in comment below with hashtag I and the free mama if you are excited about getting paid for working from home and she's back don't hit me now okay no okay the process is possible that way you're not spending a ton of time I just heard SNL making cumin batch are in my head mmm I like that with way but you'll pay the same processing fee with wave you'll pay the same processing fees you would see there you go I think that was everything