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Production invoice template for Customer Service

this one's for the photographer that does pay gigs occasionally maybe on weekends as a side hustle usually just accepts payments in cash or venmo or you transfer if you're a cool Canadian you need to invoice every single client that you work with every single client that gives you money you need to send them an invoice and today I want to walk you through how to do that because if you have no idea how to do that it's kind of confusing what do you even put on an invoice word do you find a good template for one you might even be thinking to yourself I don't need to send invoices I just do these little gigs you I get paid in cash it doesn't matter there are several great reasons to be sending invoices to your clients and I'm going to go over them with you and then I'm going to show you my invoice template that I created and that I use all the time and on top of that I'm going to be giving you guys this template for free to download in the description so if you like what you see in this video you can try it out for free there's a few good reasons so let's go over them reason number one appearances if you want to come across as a true professional you need to send an invoice because professional businesses send invoices especially if you're working with another small business now this is still good when you're working for individuals for like family photos or weddings that kind of thing but this is especially good if your clients are small businesses because they know that they know that a real business should be sending an invoice and so when you send them an invoice it comes across as really professional and a lot of the time although individuals won't care as much businesses need the invoice because they need to use it as proof of that they spent money on something to write it off for taxes which brings me to point number two not only do invoices make you look professional but they do actually have a real purpose if you're looking for a business whether it's a massive Media company or a little coffee shop if they're hiring you they're going to want to write off that as a business expense to do that properly they need proof that they spent the money on what they spent it on and so you giving them an invoice allows them to properly keep record of their expenses and do their taxes which leads me to my next point which is it helps keep you organized and do your taxes and just keep track of all the money that you're bringing it it may not seem like a problem now if you're doing one shoot a week or one shoot a month but if you want to scale up up your business if you want this to be something that can make you a good amount of money be your full-time job you need to create a system that is scalable to five shoots a week and you having a record of all the invoices that you've sent out and all the invoices that you have received payment on will make your life a lot easier in terms of keeping track of your money budgeting making sure that you actually remember to charge a client because when things get hectic and you have a week where you have five or seven shoots in one week now all of a sudden you have a list of these seven people and let me tell you a lot of businesses take their sweet time paying you if you allow them to so you need to keep track of who has paid you who needs to pay you and when they need to pay you so that you can follow up with them and Bug them and say hey it's been 30 days I still haven't received payment if you could send that along that would be great this is also really important if you ever have an issue with a client where on their end they are supposed to have only paid you a certain amount and they're trying to tell you they overpaid you or you're trying to tell them they underpaid you you can line up the bank statements with the invoices and make sure that that you have received the the proper amount of money you're supposed to so invoices make you look professional they help keep you organized your clients like them because sometimes they need them as well so what is the actual practical process of creating an invoice and sending it to your client this is again one of those things that after time just kind of feels obvious but if you're starting out and I remember feeling this way you just don't necessarily know how to go about doing this stuff so hopefully this is helpful if you do find it helpful hit the like button maybe subscribe want to see more stuff like this I've been freelancing full-time as my my job my main real job for coming up on 2 years now and so i' love to pass along these little things that I learned let's go through my invoice template I'm going to show you how I would fill it out and then how I would keep it organized to make sure that I could reference it if I need to all right so this is what my invoice template looks like I have two invoice templates I have one with my bank transfer details on it and one without when working with bigger companies that have a proper accountant and proper payroll and stuff like that their preferred payment method is usually a direct deposit or a ETF an electronic funds transfer where they take your bank details and they just put the money right into your bank account this is the most professional way of being paid as a contractor so if you're planning on working with businesses I would highly recommend having this as an option for them it will make you see more professional individuals like if you're doing weddings or portraits not as much they're probably just going to want to pay cash or E transfer and that's why I have two now it is important to note you don't necessarily need to include the bank details on the invoice some people might say this is for you know privacy reasons or whatever is probably not the ideal way of doing it I've never had a problem with it if you wanted to just Prov that information separately that would also be fine all right so starting from the top at the very top here I have my logo then in the top right in big capital letters it says invoice make it really clear what this is now there's two really important identifying numbers that you need on this invoice you need the date and you need an invoice number so first you're going to fill out the date that you're sending them the invoice this should be the date that you sending it and they are receiving it and that's important because we're going to set the payment terms at the bottom of the invoice and it's going to be based on this date next the invoice number this can be literally whatever you want as long as it's Unique unque and you have some way of keeping it organized i' would recommend like a six-digit number cuz that way you're never going to run out of numbers and you can start this number over each year now when I first started invoicing I didn't have a lot of clients and I didn't want it to seem like I didn't have a lot of clients so I didn't want to send an invoice to my client and it be like 0000001 and the next one is 00002 because then the client would look at that and be like oh this guy never sends invoices this is the second one he's ever sent and realistically there's nothing wrong with that but I just didn't like that image so what I decided to do I actually got this trick from my friend Anthony is you make the invoice number the date that the invoice has this way it's a unique number that will continue to count up as the year goes on and then you add a-h one at the end so if you send multiple invoices on that day it's - 1-2-3 and I have it formatted biggest to smallest I have it year month day that way if I have to order the invoice numbers they'll be immediately in chronological order all right now we have three main sections of the invoice after the dat we have payable to which is you we have build to which is your client and then we have a listing of the services and the costs payable to is going to be your full name your address and your contact information here in Ontario I'm registered for HST which is harmonized sales tax which means if I'm working with a business it's good to give them this number so I have that on there if you're not registered for HS don't worry about it then I like to put a big line and then build to now you're going to put the client contact information this is something you're going to want to ask them for just send an email to your client hey I'm putting together the invoice now what contact information would you like me to use for the business it's important to ask your client this especially if they're a business if they're not a business if it's just an individual just put their name and maybe their email address but if it is a business you want to put the proper business address that they have listed and sometimes when you have a larger business they have an attention line it's ATN and then a person's name and this is for them it's so that they can get the invoice and it can get sent to the right person and you can get paid some businesses do this some don't so just ask what information they would like to have on the invoice and they'll let you know that you can really be as specific or vague about the service you provided here but for tax purposes or if you ever got audited for some reason or if they ever get audited I would imagine it would be helpful to be a little bit specific about the services you performed here you have a quantity line so if you provided multiples of the same thing then you put the name of the service the cost for each of those things and then the total cost if you did multiple of them and then you add all those up on the list at the bottom you have the subtotal which is the total amount before tax then you have your sales tax and then you have the total amount that the client needs to pay you so it could look something like this quantity one service 4 hours Event Photography coverage comma the date that you performed the coverage on this is not the invoice date this is the date you actually did the job amount each $1,000 amount $11,000 again then you add this all up put it in the subtotal figure out the 13% tax and then put the full amount at the bottom and there you go that's the amount the client owes you now this should be an amount that you have discussed with the client generally speaking this number here should not be a surprise to you or the client before they see the invoice now under this you need payment terms net 15 net 30 and net 60 are really common ones and what that just means is it is payable within that amount of days from the invoice date so if it's net 15 15 days within receiving the invoice they need to have made that payment now if you have a contract with them you can stipulate that there is a late fee if they go over the net 15 or net30 that's its own separate thing if it's a reoccurring client that you trust I probably wouldn't recommend charging them a late fee if they are a few days late because you probably don't want to upset the client if they're going to use you again but that's just my opinion standard one for most companies is net30 if you have a company that's willing to do net 15 great I would recommend not doing net 60 if you can stay away from it and now you can technically just leave it net 30 but I like to go a little bit of an extra step here and say remit buy and then the date that the net 30 or net whatever would land on this just makes it extra clear pay me by this date please at the bottom I like to add just one extra line that says thanks for choosing delay any media if it's a client I don't know and I don't trust I usually take payment up front or at least a good chunk of payment up front so that I'm not doing a bunch of work and not getting paid for it and potentially having issues but if it's a client that I know and trust and it's especially if it's a client that I know is going to use me again in the future then trusting them to pay me within a 30-day window I don't have a problem with some people will tell you no you need to take the money up front but honestly I don't have a problem with it technically you can do whatever you want oh and I forgot to mention save this as a PDF so that it's not like an editable document this is going to be a word doc you can open it in word or in your Google doc whatever you input the information and then save it as a PDF file and then that way it's like it's don't send them a word doc don't do PDF and that is how you stay more organized with invoicing as a business as a photographer it's I know this seems like a lot of work but you just need to do it a couple times to get the hang of it and also this invoice template will hopefully help you at a bunch because you just got to fill out each thing again you can download that in in the description if it's something that you want to try out I'm giving it out for free if you do use the invoice template let me know in the comments cuz I would love to know that it's actually useful but I think I covered all the bases if you have any other questions about this kind of thing let me know in the comments below again I'm not like some business Guru I'm just a photographer who is running my business like this I'm also still consistently learning things like I'm sitting down with an accountant soon for the first time like a like a proper accountant to help me go through some of this stuff so I am not the the be all end all knowledge but I'm just a guy trying to run scale my freelance photography business and I know I had a ton of questions when I was starting out on this kind of thing and I also know a lot of people who don't do invoices or contracts or anything like that for their business and it's honestly just not a sustainable way of doing things so I hope you were able to take something away from this I hope this was helpful I think I covered all my bases so thank you guys for watching I'll catch you in the next one