Create an Effective Invoice Letter for Businesses Effortlessly

Invoice letter for businesses

hello there mark Cunningham here and in this video we're going to take a look at how you can set up your zero invoices so they closely match The Branding of your business and that will include adding a logo as well as some instructions on how to pay you I use the Australian version of xero in this video but it's pretty much the same process all around the world so you can watch this video no matter where you're from and if you'd like to learn more about xero then check out the links to our courses in the description below okay so over here in the Australian demo company the place you need to go to is the main menu and settings and then go to invoice settings okay so over here in the demo company there's actually a couple of invoice templates set up one of them is called standard one of them is called special projects and then there's this other special one down the bottom here called The Very orange invoice so if you're using the demo company you'll see something like this but if you're in your real business you probably won't see all these set up you might just have one set up so in the demo company here they've got a couple of them set up and that's just to show you how they work so before we actually set up a new branding theme I'll just show you a little bit about how they actually work so I'll duplicate the screen and we'll go over into invoices okay so we'll just go into any of our invoices I'll just go into this one okay so whenever you create an invoice you will assign a branding theme to it and that will determine how it looks so for this one here if I click on preview okay we can see that it's using The Branding theme that has that demo code as the logo there so it's using that one the standard one but there will be other invoices in the system that don't look like this because they use this one instead so you can have more than one branding theme going at any one time also when you actually create an invoice if you have multiple branding themes over here the one that you actually have on top here this will be your default one so when you're creating an invoice it will default to this one unless you specifically choose a different one so that's just something to keep in mind so if you actually create one of these and you want it to be the default one you just need to grab this little thing here and just shift it up to the top and I'm not sure if that's going to quite do it I might have to shift this one down like that so now the special projects one is the default one so if I go to create an invoice it will default to this one so I'd actually have to specifically choose this one all right but chances are you'll probably only just have one branding theme anyway um for your business so you probably don't need to worry about that order too much but I just thought I'd show you all right so what I'm going to do now is show you how to create one and that will determine the look and feel of your invoices like we saw over here okay so there's this new branding theme button at the top there's actually a couple of different types you can create a standard one or you can create this one where you can have a lot more flexibility but you need to create a docx word file and it's a little bit more of a difficult process and that's what this one down here uses but we're not going to do that today we're just going to create a standard branding theme all right so we can click on that or we can just click on the button here okay and it's just taken us to this pop-up which is for a new branding theme so the first thing you need to do is give it a name and you can call it whatever you like so I'm just going to call it um invoice template just like that and then as you can see you've got quite a few things that you can do through here to set up the look and feel of it but before we go through all that I'll just show you something if we just click on Save all right and I'll just see if I can get our new one and just bring it up to the top all right it's a little bit hard to do that drag and drop sometimes I just wanted to show you um how you can get the logo in there straight away so you can see here there's an upload um logo link or button there to press or you can come to this options drop down and you can click on upload logo if you do upload a logo you can actually replace it so it's not in there permanently so this one for example you can see it's got change logo so don't worry if you upload one and then you want to change it later so let's just upload it I'll just click on this and I'll just show you that it gives you this little write-up here saying what size your jpeg GIF or PNG file should be it's got to be no more than 400 pixels wide and 120 pixels high so just make sure that your logo fits into those specifications all right so I've created one so I'll just click on browse and upload it okay so there it is there so now if we click on preview I think we can actually preview it here you can see there that we've got our logo at the top okay so you can put that in first or you can put it in last if you like you don't have to do it first like I did I just thought I'd show you that right away all right so let's go in and edit it now so we've already created it so now we can just come over here and click on edit all right and we just get back to that same screen that I opened before so we've already named it so the next thing you can do is choose whether you want A4 or us letter and then down here you've got some margins that you can play with as well and you can do it in centimeters or inches I'm just going to leave that all the way it is you've also got the choice of a couple of different fonts there's not a whole lot of them there but there's a few pretty good standard ones there and then you've got your font size as well so the next thing you've got down here is the titles of your invoice so you've got the draft approved overdue invoices there and that's when you actually go and create an invoice I'll just see if if I can hit preview here yeah you see how that says tax invoice at the top so that's coming from here so that would be an approved invoice it's probably not overdue yet but that's what happens so if you create an invoice and it's just a draft and it's saved here in xero and you go to preview it it will say draft invoice at the top so I might actually go and find one if we go into drafts and we'll get that one preview and there it is at the top draft invoice and you can see because I've got that new template um at the top now it's kind of defaulted to that one as well which is something to watch out for all right so if it's in draft status it'll say that at the Top If it's approved it'll say tax invoice if it's overdue it'll say tax invoice but you can change this so if it's overdue you might actually want to type the word overdue in there like this so when it's overdue and you send it to the client again it will say overdue at the top similarly if you're creating credit notes that's just the title at the top if you're sending out statements for invoices that are due it'll say statement at the top you've also got the same thing here for purchase orders whether they're drafts or whatever you've got the same thing for quotes you've got the same thing for remittance advice and you've got the same thing for receipt so these are all just headings and if you want to change them you can go ahead and change them here just for your various documents there that you send to your customers all right so then down here you've got a bunch of choices as to what you actually want to show so if you tick on show tax number for example if I go back over here I'll see if this one's actually got it so in Australia that's the ABN so it's just showing um the ABN there and then it's all pretty straightforward so you've got things like column headings item codes unit price and quantity so you can see that's all over here quantity unit price it's got item code is unticked so there's no item codes here and then you've also got the tax column registered address you've got the logo that we uploaded and you've got some options there for things like discounts contact account number Etc so you can play around with all that based on what information you want to show up on your invoices all right you've also got some tax settings here on how you want to show your tax subtotals and then you've also got currency conversion over here so if you're using multiple currencies you've got a couple of options that you can play with as well so down here you've got these payment services you've got credit card PayPal and Bank payments so this is the demo company it doesn't have everything set up but for this one here if you actually set up so that your customers could click on a button when you email them the invoice and pay directly via stripe so if you've got stripe and you set up striping zero and you want them to pay with their credit cards directly into your stripe account you can set that up in xero and then you'll have the option to choose it here and if you do it will show up on their invoices same thing with PayPal so here in the demo company they've got a couple of weird looking PayPal accounts set up I don't know why they've got two but if you've got a PayPal account for your business you can do the same thing here set it up as a payment service and then hook it up here and your customers will be able to pay you directly via PayPal and there's the same thing here for for Bank payments as well so that's something that you can look into if you want your customers to be able to pay you quite easily all right so down here we've also got the terms and payment advice and then you've got these terms for quotes as well so this is just for quotes not for invoices down here and this is for invoices and statements so if I come back over here I don't think this has actually got anything in there I'll go back find another invoice okay this has got it so down the bottom here when paying by check please complete this payment advice blah blah blah and then there's online payment so it's given a BSB an account number there um which would be sort code and account number if you're in the UK and then just a little bit of text there so this is just text that's been inserted at the bottom of the invoice and it comes from here so if you want to type out some text telling people the best way to pay you if you want to give a bank account number or if you accept checks and you want to tell them how to do it this is where you write it and then for quotes if you send people quotes this is just the terms of the quotes So if you don't do quotes you won't need to fill this out and the terms of things like um you need to get back to us within seven days this quote is only valid for seven days or something like that Okay so up the top here we've also got logo alignment so we've got left Center and right when I did the preview the logo was on the right hand side of if you want it to be in the left or the center you can choose it there and then you've got taxes whether they're inclusive or exclusive um of GST or vat or whatever you've got in your country for sales tax so these are all things you just need to muck around with and just find out what works best for you also you've got enter your contact details as they should appear at the top of all your PDFs so you can write in your contact details there and that's it so if we just click on Save okay we now have this invoice template or this branding theme that we've called invoice template and that's our default template now okay so like we saw before you've got some options down here you can go back in and edit it you can copy it to a new one you can change the logo you can delete it if you don't want it anymore you can preview it here or you can just remove the logo so there's a few things to do there I'll also just show you if I go back into edit this section here with the payment services for PayPal and stripe Etc if you want to set that up you go here to payment services okay so you can go down here and you can set up stripe for example to do the bit with the credit cards and you can set up Paypal and you can set up other things as well so I'm not doing that here because I've got different videos on that so you can have a look for my different videos and once you've got them set up here like I showed you then they flow through to here and you can just choose them here okay so that's how you set it up so what I'll do I'll go back over to invoices and we'll get out of that and go back to invoices and we'll just click on new invoice okay so you can go ahead and create an invoice and I'm just showing you here where you choose your branding theme is right here as you can see we've got invoice template which is the one we just set up and then you've got the other ones down here and you can see they're all in the same order actually as what we had on the other page so it defaults to invoice template because that's the one that we've got on top if we click on that and hit preview there's obviously not not much in it but you can see how that's come up with the um with the logo there okay and that's how you do it and it's the same sort of thing if I go back and we go into quotes and we go new quote and you can see there there's branding themes here as well and you can choose the brand new theme there and just preview it and everything like we saw before okay so that's how you can put your own branding on your invoices and a few other documents in xero