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Project management invoice template for Public Relations

Hello. Hello. I've got a short and sweet video for you today. Hopefully I got word that Squarespace is now allowing you to send invoices and kind of have like some CRM or CMS functionality. And if you don't know what those. Those acronyms mean CRM is client relationship manager. CMS is client management system. They're very similar tools for me personally. What I use is HoneyBook. I've talked about it before. I've got videos on this channel about that one. Um, but I want to kind of compare how Squarespace invoices and HoneyBook work, because I think this is great. You know, I use Squarespace as my website host for most of my websites. And I think, especially for those. Who are just starting out and, you know, maybe you only have a couple of clients. This could be really nice to not have to have a whole tool, a whole additional tool, because this invoicing, uh, capability is available on all of the plans for free to my understanding. So let's get in there into the backend, see what it's all about. See if I like it and I'll give you, give you the rundown at the end. All right. So we're in here and how I got here is in my Squarespace menu, this kind of left hand thing. It's under invoicing. So I just clicked on invoices and here we go. So it's pretty bare bones, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. One of the complaints I get about HoneyBook, I'll show an example on the screen here is that it's very overwhelming and I'm going to be honest. I love HoneyBook so, so much, but. I agree. Sometimes I still get overwhelmed. So we'll just start by clicking on create invoice and see what happens. Um, so we can add a new client, select an existing client or add ourselves as a test. Let's go with that one. Continue. Okay. Let's see. So what can we customize here? Due date. All right. So we can customize the due date. So I could say it's not due at the end of the month. One thing I don't love about this is I can't do like a net 15 or a net 30. That's usually what I do is I just click the button. So I don't need to think about it in my brain, but okay. We can also customize the memo, which is nice. Hey, Latosha, I always recommend personalizing your invoices, just sending a quick little note, uh, reminds them why they're paying you, you know, and then we can add our actual order summary. So video shoot, I'm just going to say, decide whether it's a service or physical and how much it costs, and then we can. Stack. So we could say photo shoot as well. And that will go ahead and automatically update our total amount. So that's nice. And then we could also apply a discount if we wanted percentage or dollar amount. So I could do 15 percent military discount or, you know, whatever I wanted to do. I would love to be able to write out what the discount is for. Like I said, if I wanted to say this is a military discount or a, um, You know, get a discount because you're a previous client or something like that. I think it's always nice just to be able to add in a little information on what it's about. And then we've got our styles. So email styles, let's see. Um, Oh, cool. So we could quickly match our site and just use the same colors from our website, which is pretty cool. Not really like any of these, but I need to go through a rebrand of my website anyway. So that's probably why I don't like it, but you can also just customize it yourself. So we won't get into that too much. And I love just like on the Squarespace website that you can view it on mobile as well. All right. So let's see, we're going to send one cent recipients will be able to pay this invoice. You can edit and resend an invoice until a payment has been made. Manage payments directly on Squarespace. Klarna is available. That's pretty cool. So this is actually pretty awesome. And this is something that they've got over HoneyBook is that if you want to offer any type of after pay to your clients by now pay later, they could do that through here, I get that question asked a lot, um, you know, for, for coaching or other services. And at this time I just don't offer it. You can use Klarna after pay all that for my courses. But not for my services. So just something to keep in mind. I know some people don't like those and that's fine, but that is kind of huge, honestly, and you could also just connect to PayPal. So this is kind of what your back end like CRM or CMS would look like. You'll log in here. You'll be able to see all of the money that you've made through your invoices, how many have been paid and how many are outstanding. I do like the look of this. It's really simple. Yeah, I think it's pretty nice. You can resend, you can edit, you can preview, you can duplicate. Um, I like the look of it. It's real nice and simple. So here's what it looks like on the customer's end and they can just click on pay invoice and looks nice and simple. I don't know how we edit these. I'm sure there is a way I just rushed through it, but I would love to see the thumbnails on here, but it looks super clean. I honestly like the look of it from a client perspective. Yeah, it looks really clean from the client perspective, honestly. Okay. So that's that. So. My critiques here, you can't do anything like auto. You can't do like link your bank account as the customer. So that things just get auto paid. You can't do recurring invoices. That's important. If you're going to be doing, let's say a social media management service, you don't want to have to go in and create an invoice every single month. It's nice to just be able to say, send this out on the first of the month. The discount field, you know, just a little bit of personalization. I think. Could be, could be cool. Oh, and another big thing is you can't download. I don't believe I can't download. I can preview, but something that I like to be able to do. Actually, I don't know if you can do this on HoneyBook either, but wave is another invoicing tool that I have used. I will often like create the invoice and then just download the PDF and attach it to an email. Sometimes my clients need that to send to their like accounting departments and things like that. So I'd really love the opportunity or the ability to just be able to download it as a PDF, even just to save for your records, because there's really no way. It doesn't look like to like download any of this stuff. You kind of just. You know, you kind of just have to look at it through here. So that's not always super helpful. Now you can also create, okay. Proposals, estimates, contracts, and projects. Ooh, I don't know. I think I like this. This is pretty cool. So this is the proposal option. It, this just looks really clean and sleek. And again, I'm pretty sure you could just use your site styles. Boom. Now it matches my website. Which again, needs some work, so go back to the original, but, uh, I really like this, you know, it's super plug and play social media management for appraisal created for Latasha James. I wonder if you can save these as templates or duplicate them. Not sure, but let's just go ahead and pretend that we'd like this. You can customize your message. I like that. I don't know. This is, this is better than I was thinking. I thought I thought like the invoicing was it, but I guess we've got a lot of things going on here and it kind of nice, honestly, you can add some milestones so you can say first month content calendar is due on July 1st. First, boom, boom. You can add some notes. Let's look at it really quick from the client view, view document, and here's what they would get. And then they just need to accept it. You're confirming you've read the details. Does anything change for me? Document accepted. So nothing's really automatic, you know, like there's no way to just automatically say, all right, so then send the invoice or send the contract. So it's a little, you know, a little manual, but it does look really good. An estimate I'm going to assume is pretty similar to our proposal. I'm not really going to spend too much time on that. And then we've got contracts. Let's see what this is all about. So. Interesting. Can you sign though? Can you like e sign is what I want to know. No templates. You know, this is a big thing. This is one of the number one reasons why I love HoneyBook is because they have a library of templates. Not just contracts, but also proposals and forms and all kinds of things in there. So if you are starting out and you're like, I don't know what to do as far as a contract, it is really nice because you can use those. You can also e sign. Which is nice. So let's just go ahead and send it. Okay. So, yeah, so they would just click on accept, accept, and then you get a confirmation email as the customer. Is that legally binding? I'm, I'm not sure. I'm not sure if that is legally binding, but it's something I would be careful with that one. That one gives me the most concern, but the invoices. I like it. If you're fine with just doing a one off, you know, this is something that I could see myself using. For example, let me, let me, let me stop sharing and start talking and give you, give you that my final feedback. Okay. So quick first impressions invoicing in particular, I think could be great for one off projects or just maybe your first couple of projects. Let's say you're just dipping your toe in the water of the world of freelance. You're not sure if you actually want to do this long term, you're not sure if we're going to get actual recurring clients, but you know, you want to just test it out, sure, test out Squarespace invoicing. If you're already using a Squarespace website, it's going to save you a little bit of money rather than having to go to, you know, a secondary tool. I do have concern with. e signing, downloading, those things I think are quite important for things like contracts and even invoices in some situations. I also think HoneyBook really wins when it comes to templates. I mean, templates are really nice to have something to start with, especially when it comes to, you know, Contracts, for example, the ones in HoneyBook are drafted by actual attorneys, which gives me some peace of mind. The other big con about Squarespace invoicing is that, or the, the projects, whatever it is that they're calling it, is that there aren't automations that I'm seeing, or really, Anything that's even semi automated. It's all very, very manual. So you can't assign, you know, a net 30 or enough net 15. You can't do any type of, uh, workflows is what they're called in HoneyBook, where let's say somebody signs a contract and they get automatically sent an invoice or a form or something like that. So those things do come really in handy, especially. Especially once you kind of get into your groove and you start managing more than one client at a time. I think this is great. Like I said, if you're just side hustling, just starting out, just trying things on for size. But once you start really trying to scale your business, this stuff will take you forever. Taking a client through the process of, you know, a proposal to a contract, to an invoice. That, I know it sounds. Like super quick, but I mean, I've already sat here for like 30 minutes, just exploring the tool. So if this were a real client and I was really customizing all this stuff. Yeah, it would definitely add up and that's time taken away from my client or, you know, from my life. So I think this is cool. I think it's great. If you are somebody who is in that scaling phase though, and you're looking for automations, you're looking for templates, you're looking for a little bit more customization in terms of, uh, view, there's also things like a scheduler and what else is there that I use in HoneyBook all the time. Some of the accounting stuff is a little bit more honed in and detailed. I think you should check out HoneyBook. I've got a, I believe I still have a 50 percent off link for you that I would link down in the description, but. If you're just starting out, yeah, I think I recommend this. I think I recommend checking it out. Just be careful with those contracts. Like I said, um, I'm not sure how legally binding clicking an accept button is. I really don't know if there are any lawyers out there watching, please do let me know, but just want to share this with you really quickly. Hopefully it helps some of you and let me know if you have any questions or want me to dive into anything else about it. Um, if you're new here, please subscribe to my channel. I post videos about entrepreneurship and marketing and tech, uh, a couple times per week. And I'll see you in the next one. Bye.