Create the Best Invoice Template on Google Docs for Businesses

Invoice template on google docs for businesses

all right welcome uh in this video I want to show you talk about a sales invoice and show you how you can fill out a Sal invoice really quickly and easily um generally a sales invoice is used in business when you have a customer that um that needs to pay you for either a service or a product that you've sold them so let's say for instance that I do I have a lawn care business and I have a customer and the customer calls me and asks me to come and their lawn and uh and fertilize mow and fertilize so I go there I do my thing um it takes me about four hours and then I would issue them the sales invoice so that they know what they owe me I'd either drop it I could either do itead of time and drop it off at their house or I could put it in the mail or I could get it to them electronically so what you see up here and this is uh template from Google Docs I'm going to put a link in the description so that you can um so that you can get to it you'll need to choose file make a copy um but there's lots of different templates that are online they're all pretty similar uh it's got a spot up top that says sales invoice that's great it's also got some room if you want had any branding like a company logo or anything you could put it up there um and then up at the top you've got a spot for your company name and address so let's say this is uh Mr O's lawn care and then we got a spot for our address one two three 4 wherever Road and let's say I'm in Bay City Michigan 48706 so this is there for the customer so that if they do decide to mail you a paper check in the in the snail mail they know the address that they can send it to um as you move down you've got a spot for who you're billing this to so if I if my customer name was James T Sullivan and James T Sullivan lives at uh [Music] 555 Willoughby Drive in Auburn Michigan 48611 so that's got your customer's address so that if you decide to mail them the invoice you have you know where you're mailing it to um like I said invoices could be sent electronically you can send them through email in which case it's not vital that you have the customers information but you you probably should then we move over and we've got a spot for the invoice number so a lot of businesses will just number their invoices starting with number one number two number three number four number five that's great um you want to make sure that every invoice that you do has its own unique number so you keep moving forward you wouldn't want to have two invoice number ones kicking around for instance you'd want want to go to number two or number three um one thing that some other businesses will do is they'll use a numbering system that includes the year so this would be my first invoice issued in 2024 so that's another way you can do it I'm going to stick with that um then when it when the calendar flips to 2025 I'll start with 25 Dash just another way to help keep your invoices in order the date is usually going to be the date that the customer was serviced so let's say that I mowed this lawn on July 1st of 2024 the due date is typically sometime after that so you're the whole idea of an invoice is that they are going to pay you later so giving them a due date is a good idea two weeks is pretty standard um if you want to give them a month to pay you can you can give them a month that's up to your business but um this is a two-e we're saying that it's due two weeks after I mowed the lawn and did the service so then we've got um four different the template has a spot for four different items that you can include on an invoice typically it's good business practice to give the customer a lot of detail as to what they owe you so for instance um instead of just saying you owe me 125 bucks I want to break this down so that the customer knows so some of this comes from the fact that I showed up and did some work so my first item is going to be hours of Labor so I type hours labor and then quantity I said this job took me four hours so I'm going to put a four in there for quantity the price is the price per one so if I charge $20 an hour for my labor I put $20 in there I worked four hours at 20 bucks an hour that's where you do the math and multiply this out that comes out to be $80 four time 20 is 80 so they owe me $80 but this allows the customer to see oh they were here and they worked for four hours and they're charging me $20 an hour it gives the customer some detailed information I said I also fertiliz their lawn too so let's say that we um had Lawn fertiliz Lawn Fertilizer that I purchased and I used and I need to to build them for let's say that I use two bags of fertilizer and each bag is $30 so this once again it shows the customer some detail oh they use two bags of lawn fertilizer that's $30 per bag so they use $60 worth of fertilizer um the last thing that I'm going to include is sales tax so generally I'm not going to put any quantity for sales tax I'm not going to put a price but generally generally sales tax is applied to Goods but not services so I don't charge sales tax on the labor but I do charge sales tax on the fertilizer because the fertilizer is a good whereas the labor is a service so if I charge 6% sales tax and I had $60 worth of fertilizer that's 60 taxable dollars times 06 that gives me $3.60 in sales tax so that's what I'm going to put here is 3.60 I'm G add a dollar sign here as well so then line four I don't need so I'm just going to highlight all of line four and then if I rightclick um I'm going to delete that row so then I scroll down a little bit further and it's got uh a spot for a total 80 plus60 plus $3.60 I could haul out the calculator but I'm pretty good with math that adds up to $143 60 so they owe me 14360 and sometimes you'll have people that do invoices that just say give me 140 360 but I think most customers like it when it's a little more itemized and they can see I'm paying for 4 hours of Labor and two two bags of fertilizer and sales tax and that's how we get that 14360 there's also a little note section um thanks for your business that's a nice touch if you uh if you wanted to include payment information down here you could add that please pay by check or let's say you wanted to accept PayPal and then you'd want to put your PayPal so any information that they would need to pay you if you want to accept payment um through PayPal or venmo or any other electronic payment service um that's something that you could add down there as well um some businesses will offer a discount if you pay within the payment period and you could add notes about that so any other notes anything else that you wanted to make a note of you could um so that's the gist of an invoice once again sales invoice at the top business information contact information phone numbers here are never a bad ID as well if you had a phone number that you wanted to add that would uh you know give uh give an easy reference in case the customer needed to call you about anything you could put an email address any contact information that the customer should probably have can go up there you've got customer information in this bill to section invoice number the date of service or the date of sale the date that it's due then you've got your itemized description and and you add all that up and you get a total so that gives you a finished invoice um you can print this out and drop it in the mail you can uh you could attach this as a document to an email um as long as the customer gets the invoice um if you do need to um create some sort of paper copy or electronic copy you can go to file download and a PDF PDF is a pretty standard form that's portable document format that's really good for printing and mailing and attaching electronically any of that and then you'll have a file that you can work with um I would also suggest when I get to my next customer that I create a new invoice so if I'm going to go back into this invoice I would go to file and choose make a copy and then I might call it like invoice 242 because my first invoice was 241 so my next invoice is going to be 242 make a copy and then that's going to bring up another Co copy that's pretty much the same that you can that you can change this number to 242 change the customer change the details but really it's pretty easy to crank them out once you do the first one so I hope this helps walk you through the idea of creating an invoice why they're created and how you fill in the blanks on the template um thanks for watching good luck