Create Professional Invoices with the FreshBooks Invoice Generator for Product Management

Freshbooks invoice generator for Product Management

[Music] hey everybody this is maria weaver and welcome back to the simplified bookkeeper in this video we're going to dive in and continue our discussion around building a winning bookkeeping tech stack and specifically today we're going to talk about a fun topic at least to me is talking about invoicing your customers and then really how to save money how to increase your profits around the payment fees associated with receiving customer payments so let's get into this we're going to talk about three things i'm going to give you three tips in this video that are going to help you do just that so this video is going to be for you if you are a small business who is invoicing your customer either before services or products are rendered or after or maybe you have a business where you're charging 50 up front and then you're billing the other 50 after the product or service is due so this video isn't really pertaining to you if you are more of like an e-commerce business or something where it's like a point of sale where everything's happening at exactly the same time because you obviously don't invoice and receive payment later if that makes sense you're just receiving payment at the time that the product is either shipped or delivered so let's get into this the first thing that i want to chat with you about is about payment processors in general just to make sure that we kind of talk about this landscape a little bit so there are so many payment processors out there and the reason is that there are fees right there are fees that you and i are paying as business owners to these companies and everybody kind of wants a bit of the pie right everybody wants to get that one percent ach transfer or that three percent credit card fee and so there's a lot of different options for you to choose from and honestly it's a little bit much right we're trying to run a business here we don't really know which payment processor to go with or how it's going to help you so in general what you want to do and this is tip number one is you want to pick one you want to pick one payment processor that you use to receive payments from everyone that's just what you want to do because one is certainly less than two three or four and it's going to take out a lot of the complexity so what i'm going to show share with you today is one way that you can do this using stripe it's my preferred payment processor i'm going to tell you why but that's tip number one is to choose one payment processor so i want you to think about this before we dive into freshbooks for a second i want you to write down what are all of the accounts that you currently have active right now do you use paypal do you have a stripe account do you use quickbooks payments what are all the ways right now that you are receiving payments from your customers do you take checks do you take ach and then how is that stuff happening are you doing it through your bank but i want you to just write down right now on a piece of paper what are all of the active accounts that you know you have or the places where you're receiving those customer payments i know how that's working so let's dive into this specifically so we're on the dashboard of this new company called craigs landscaping and design we're going to go straight over to invoices so let's say that you and i have just set up our new account with freshbooks and we want to get started by creating an invoice for our first customer so you're going to notice at the top that i i have a button that says accept online payments and then a new invoice so we're just going to start by adding an invoice so we're going to choose joe adams as our customer invoice number one and we're going to say that we did landscape design services and we are charging him five thousand dollars let's say that we're going to bill him this is just half of the bill and then we're going to do the other half when we're finished and i just want you to be able to see like see how it's changing as i move my cursor around is i am modifying this side i'm able to add a payment schedule so if this is the total amount so if the 5000 was the total amount then i could break that down and charge that to the customer in a schedule if i didn't want to you know charge him everything up front and then you're going to notice over on the right hand side what are some things that you can do you can change the style you can notice here it says accept online payments we're going to go here in just a second you can make these recurring invoices as you like you can set up reminders charging late fees you can even have attachments or receipts onto your invoice but here's the point to remember is that by adding an invoice in freshbooks this isn't going anywhere else this is simply you creating an invoice in freshbooks it's not sending the invoice to the customer it's not receiving the money from the invoice it's not telling another app that you've done this we have no integration set up right now so it's just simply adding the invoice into freshbooks and so that's all that we're doing here when we turn on the online payment option it will give us the option to then send these to customers and then accept payments so i'm going to go ahead and cancel this right now just for our purposes and let's go to accept online payments this is something that you really only have to do one time unless you want to close the account or something like that so when you're in the freshbooks world you have really three ways that you can collect payments and so the first one obviously is freshbooks payments they have their own payment processor it's obviously seamless with freshbooks app and the fees associated with it are about the same as anybody else you're going to get a three percent charge about if you accept credit cards you also will have to pay a one percent fee if you do ach transfer so you can go ahead and select this now my recommendation is that you go with stripe and we'll talk about paypal here in just a second but stripe is really my recommendation for a few different reasons really quick i'll go through those stripe is a very well-known platform and so when your customers get an invoice from you and they see that you that they can pay via stripe they're probably going to be comfortable with that unless they're just not they haven't heard of stripe but it's kind of like square or some of these other payment processors it's pretty widely known and so it's a reputable company that they're gonna go with and go ahead and make that payment the other nice thing i really like about stripe is that when you have a stripe account you can go in and let's say that this customer has paid you the five thousand dollars let you can actually go into the stripe account and you can automatically set up recurring payments so if that customer does need to pay you an additional five thousand dollars for the work to be finished then you can communicate with your client and then let them know that this card will automatically be charged in 30 days or whenever let's say you don't charge it until the project is done then you can set it up to be charged on a certain day that is really helpful for many different reasons um it keeps you from having to create you know other invoices you know it just it helps you to not have to go through the collections process with any customer the other nice thing about using stripe and their interface when you have an account is if you have a business where you're doing recurring services so let's say that you're a coach and you coach someone every month and there's a fee associated with that monthly coaching you can do what's called setting up a subscription in squad and stripe for that customer so let's say that you charge them 500 a month or a thousand dollars a month or whatever it is you can go ahead and set that person up as a subscription in stripe and it makes it very simple it it does a lot of things for you so for example it will send a reminder to that person say hey your card is about to be charged um you know in three days and then it will send them a receipt so it really helps to automate your process on your end and you don't feel like you're in here handling the invoicing so much um really quick i'll go over paypal and why i do not recommend paypal a lot of business owners that we work with use paypal for a lot of different things you might be using paypal to receive payments but you also might be using paypal to pay things or to pay for expenses and so paypal is something that a lot of times honestly we when we bring on a new client we end up having to clean up and it takes a long time to clean it up because either the integration with paypal is um duplicating transactions or sometimes things are added that were added incorrectly and so you'll also notice that it doesn't really show their fees and the reason they don't show it i think is because their fee structure is very complicated and so anytime i just see complication i just kind of stay away i'm like i don't obviously this channel is called the simplified bookkeeper for a reason i don't like complexity but if you have to like sit down for half an hour and try to understand a payment processor's fees i just think that that's not really that great so for a lot of reasons that i won't go into all of them i just don't recommend paypal there's a couple of those that i shared so tip number one again is to choose one payment processor my recommendation is that you go with stripe the second thing that we want to do the second tip is wherever you can you want to set up recurring payments and that goes back to what i mentioned with stripe earlier is that once you have an account with stripe you're able to go let's say joe adams was our customer we're able to click on joe adams and we're able to make the payment that he just made let's say he just paid the 5 000 invoice we're able to set that up as a recurring payment so again going back to the example of the coach and you're charging somebody 500 a month you can do that that really helps you so much from just a workflow just streamlining your workflow to not have to worry like oh did i invoice her for that you know you just don't have to do that it's happening automatically and then of course in freshbooks you're also able to set up that invoice to recur on its own you just wouldn't have to even send it out it would just be paid automatically through stripe the third thing that we want to talk about is you know when you think about payment processing and invoicing in general um what you want to do is schedule time every week to do this and so whatever that day looks like but you want to schedule a day not that it takes you an entire day but just schedule some time every week i actually do fridays i do friday mornings at a certain time where i just go into my accounting software and i look at my invoices i enter any invoices that i need to enter i also run a report called an aging report and we talk more about this in bookkeeping blueprint but it's something that you want to look at because it helps you to know if your invoices or if your customers are late on their payments so some of the tips i've shared with you today are really to help you not have that situation it's really a best practice if you can either bill before the service is rendered or you can set people up on an automatic monthly payment so that you just mitigate as many payment issues as you can it's definitely not the best practice to do all of this work and then send an invoice to a customer or a client and then they not pay you at least want to invoice on a retainer or something and again like i said we talked a lot more about this in my online course bookkeeping blueprint so you can check the comments below for more information on that but really that's what you want to do as part of this sort of this time that you set aside is say okay do i have all my invoices here which invoices are late um maybe i forgot to invoice someone you know just to kind of review the week review the work that you've been doing review the work that's coming up and just make sure that your invoicing is set up you also want to use this time to check out your stripe account or your fresh books let's say that you decide you know i'm going to check this out and try freshbooks payments a lot more of the freshbooks payments is going to be within here but just like in the example of stripe you want to go into your stripe account you know you want to make sure that your customers are set up properly you want to make sure that if you have recurring payments that those recurring payments are actually happening or maybe one got missed or you didn't set up the subscription as it needs to be set up so i hope this video was helpful again i'm going to go over those three tips again here at the end so tip number one is to choose one and only one payment processor so you made that list at the beginning of the video check over your list and see which ones you just really like and you want to continue but i would just i would really highly highly advise that you just choose one and then you just inactivate the other ones or do what's needed just to move you to one payment processor step number two is to set up recurring automatic payments wherever you can so if that is something that you can do for your business then i certainly recommend that and then number three is to pick a day that you're going to look over your invoices you're going to create invoices here in freshbooks you're going to make sure that your recurring payments and stripe are being handled correctly and just make sure that you know you're working really hard here you want to make sure that you are billing appropriately for the work that you are doing so thank you so much i hope this video was helpful please leave a comment below if you have any questions around just payment processors in general or fresh bugs there's a lot more videos coming on freshbooks i absolutely am so excited about this platform and everything it can do to really simplify your bookkeeping so until next time take care