Discover the Ultimate Musician Invoice Example for Operations

Musician invoice example for Operations

well hey there I'm Jay welcome to my booth so when I started off in voiceover there was a ton of stuff that I just had no idea how to do what I was doing with it and a fundamental point for me was when I stopped thinking of myself as Jay Meyer's voice over talent and I started thinking of myself as small business owner and operator who provides the services of J Meyer's voice over talent and that little semantic shift was really really helpful for me in terms of just reformatting how I approached a lot of stuff namely client interactions and client experience as well as the businessy side of things a big side of that is invoicing your clients so that's what I'm going to talk to you about today because it was a point that stressed me out and I had no idea how to do it so I'm going to walk you through a few tools that I use or have used to invoice my clients and then how you can get paid via those invoices so that it's easy for you and easy for your clients if you have any questions about this or anything else a voiceover related you're always welcome to drop me a line below or Reach Out directly via my website and if you're interested in one-on-one coaching either for businessy stuff like this or if you want to work on your commercial skills your audiobook reading whatever it may be that's also available on my website if that's appealing to you so invoicing at its Essence is simply telling your client how much they owe you for your services and how to pay you simple as that a great tool for it is any spreadsheet software Google Sheets Excel numbers they're all easy to use and Google Sheets is free all of them also have an invoice template available to anyone who uses them you just click on the templates invoice boom it pops up and is ready for you to use now with any invoice it's really really important in terms of your workflow and saving you time to have a blank template and that's helpful for anything whether it's invoices contract agreements whatever it is if you can save yourself work by having a sort of format that you can go back to that's really really helpful so with this invoice what I would do I would go through and say I would change the color scheme to match the branding of my website let's make this gray and then we'll change this to be a sort of gold color because that's what I have on my website same with this one we'll make that gold and I would go through this whole uh invoice and just make sure the color schemes right maybe upload my logo to it if you have a logo for your business if you have a headshot that you like that's great to put on there in addition anything on the invoice that's going to be the same anytime you send it to any client type that in and save it in your template so for here we'll go J Myers v v v o That's the company name my address if you are working from home like I am you can put your home address there if you're not comfortable doing that you can use a proxy address like a PO box or just leave your email if that's all you want to put up there and then if the client needs the information for their accounting or keeping you on their books for whatever reason and you don't want to leave it on the invoice you can just wait for them to request it and provide it at your own discretion I've never had an issue with it so I just leave my address on my invoices to my clients next will be the payable two section it's always going to be you so I'll just put my company here and the last thing that I would do is any notes these are things like terms and conditions if you have uh things that weren't outlined in the contract if you want to put something like refer to the contract I also which I'll talk about in a bit put my bank information in the notes so that my clients know where the money should go I'll talk more about that in a moment when I talk about how you can get paid by your clients so as of that that's all the stuff that's going to be consistent for me from Project to project once I've got it all set up I'll save this as invoice blank template and we're good to go now I just did a job I narrated a documentary for some folks and so we'll fill in their information I'll go into this template maybe duplicate it in my uh in my folder so that I'm not overwriting the same file just to be safe let's put in the client name oh they have a great name if the client provides you an address you can plug it in here though it's not necessary sometimes they'll request it sometimes you don't have it I don't have this one so we'll just delete it for the sake of cleanliness the project name it was called documentary very creative next is the day that we send the invoice to the client the reason why this is important is you want that in your records that you sent it to them on this date you know when the invoices due and you know when you sent it to them so that if there's any issues they lose it they say they didn't receive it you have proof hey I sent it on this date so today for me is July 8 2023 and then the due date standard practice is usually 30 days after the invoice was received I.E 30 days after you sent the invoice I'm not interested in doing the math so we'll just say August 8 2023 if I'm wrong also be it it's close enough same day next month um and there we go now let's get into the meat of the invoice what we did and how much they owe us for it we narrated The documentaries so documentary narration and let's just say for this one we agreed in our contract which I'll have a separate video on soon that I'm just going to do this for a flat fee of 500 that's neither a standard rate it's just for demonstration purposes so take that for food of thought and we also did a live directed session with them so I'll put a live directed session my rate for live directed sessions at this point in my career is 125 an hour unless it's a specific job I also ask a one hour minimum with my directed sessions and that's just because for me personally out of experience usually I need to block out that much time even if it doesn't take the full hour so I ask for the client to essentially pay for that time up front so I can reserve it for them and uh give myself some wiggle room around it so 125 per hour and prorated after the fact this session was an hour and a half so I'll go 1.5 boom and we're all set up now this invoice template has an adjustment section so let's say I want to give them a discount on the live directed session or something like that I can plug that discount in here and that way I still have everything noted in the invoice section the item lines as it were which is just helpful for tracking things if you want there was no adjustments on this invoice so I delete it now this invoice is ready to rock and be sent off to the client for spreadsheet software I download it as a PDF and email it directly to them or their accounting department boom now I'll talk about a couple other softwares that I find really helpful for invoicing clients everything we just talked about should transfer over just fine the first is any accounting software I use zero personally you can also use QuickBooks or my personal favorite for when I I was starting out wave it is a free software to use free bookkeeping free accounting and free invoicing Unlimited in any currency it's a fantastic software that I highly highly highly recommend and it's the same deal it you pull the invoice up I can customize it up here put in my name company name address my brand details I can customize the colors on it the client information I can save here I can have that on file basically I can set the automatic payment dates to be 30 days after so I don't have to constantly do that math and then down here in the item lines I can save different services so I've got my live directed session setup narration set up and I can adjust those per invoice if necessary it's really really great to have all that streamlined because it just saves you time in the long run there are a couple other softwares that you can use there are dead dedicated freelancer websites that give you full client experiences full project workflows where you can handle the contract the item delivery sending them the audio files and payment all on the website things like honeybook or Bonsai if you're interested look into those I haven't personally used them but some people find them really really great and help save time now now that we've got the invoicing out of the way how do you get paid after sending the invoice there are a few ways you can do it if you're doing something from a spreadsheet software like Google Sheets you can ask them to pay you via a payment software things like PayPal venmo cash app stripe square whatever you prefer you can send them that information separately you can also invoice directly from those softwares on occasion which can make things easier for you the downside to those softwares or those payment services is that they will always ask for a transaction fee and the transaction fees vary per software or service depending on just whatever they've decided is fair for them and those fees can range from one percent of the full amount meaning so for this invoice 687.50 one percent of that is gonna be about six to eight bucks maybe uh which may be somewhat nominal for this but once you start getting into large numbers amounts in the thousands the multiple thousands even tens of thousands that one percent fee starts to get pretty substantial which is the reason why I request that my clients pay me directly from bank to bank the term for that is an ACH transfer or sometimes a direct debit transfer the way that I handle those is in my invoices again down in this notes section that I was talking about earlier I'll just provide my bank information and it's really simple to do I'll just put I'll show you on Wave here because it's a little simpler but down on these notes I can just put Wells Fargo my company name or the account holder name and then just the account number the routing number and if you're working with International clients they may and on occasion need the wire transfer routing number or the swift key Swift keys are specific bank keys that work from International transfer I don't know specifically what it is but it's easy to find you Just Google Wells Fargo Chase whatever Swift keys and they'll pop up and I'll put those down in the notes and terms say use these banking information use the below banking information to make a direct ACH transfer please and thank you if you are not comfortable putting your bank information there that's totally fine there are a number of ways that you can work around it first is to use one of those payment softwares or services that we talked about PayPal Etc you don't have to provide anyone with your private bank information if that's not something you're comfortable with Additionally you can use a service like wise what wise is is I highly highly recommend it especially if you're working with International currencies for example I'm in USD but I work with people in the EU in uh Great British pound Etc and those transfer fees really add up once you move to international waters so what wise does is it just helps you to reduce that by giving you bank accounts in those native currency sectors which then allows you to request money in whatever currency you want and then have that transferred to your native currency or directly to your bank account so that's helpful if you just want another step of protection in addition to reducing your international fees wise I cannot recommend it enough now if you are going with the payment services a benefit of these accounting programs like wave zero QuickBooks the same deal as PayPal Etc they'll have a fee but they will also allow your clients to pay directly via the invoice which may be worth the transaction fee for you because sometimes honestly for me it can be a bit of a headache to have to tell every client how to make an ACH transfer so if that transaction fee is worth it for you it's just right here and they can pay via the invoice and it makes it really easy for everyone involved so that's sort of an intro and breakdown as to how to handle your invoices how to set it up and then how to collect payments uh off of them again if you have any questions about this please feel free to drop me a line below and of course I'm not a CPA I'm not a financial advisor so take what I say with a grain of salt always do some backup research this is just how I handle it and you may find a better way for you out there so until the next one please be well and I'll see you there toodles