Discover Powerful QBO Invoice Templates for Planning

Qbo invoice templates for Planning

hi i'm shawanda from ignitedfinancial.com and in this video i'm going to show you how to customize the quickbooks online invoice template that's on brand and get you paid on time start by clicking on the gear icon then custom form styles now quickbooks online provides you with a generic invoice template and you can open it by clicking on this drop down menu and then preview pdf honestly the generic invoice that quickbooks provides doesn't look terrible but we are going to judge it up a bit with a logo branding colors and specifics your clients will need in order to make sure that you are paid on time click on new style and then invoice there are three different tabs you're going to work with design content and emails let's update the name of this template to hourly invoice then we'll click on dive in with the template quickbooks provides you with six different templates um this is the airy classic i'm gonna end up sticking with that one but let's look at the airy new modern fresh bold and friendly pick whichever one you want imma do eerie classic then you can add your unique logo and we'll click here and quickbooks allows you to add up to 10 logos so i'm gonna end up doing two an oval logo and then i'm going to add a square logo and click save now you can change the size of the logo as well as the placement of the logo on your invoice you can hide it or you can show it you can add a pop of color yeah yeah you can do all that okay so quickbooks gives you a few options to choose from let's look at a few of them and then and then here you can add like your specific branding colors so i'm gonna add mine you can choose a different font there aren't that many you get four finds ariel career time is new roman and helvetica i like how bitter because that's what i'm going to go with and then you can adjust the font a little bit eight points 12 points and stick with the middle and go with 10 points you can change the page margins i am going to leave them as is i think they're fine and here if you want to print out your invoice and put it in a window envelope you can do that and if you want to use letterhead and then at this point you might want to prove your invoice so let's take a look at it preview pdf okay now it's starting to look like something now let's take a look at the content tab this is the header section the table section and the footer section let's start from the top the company info settings apply to all form styles they tell you this at the top because this is really important if you change this information in the business name phone email on down this company information from here to here then it will change across your entire quickbooks company so be very careful about changing this that said i'm about to change it you can check these boxes to show these items on your invoice and personally i don't include anything on my invoice that i don't want my clients to use so if i don't want you to call me about a bill then i'm not gonna put my phone number on the bill but you can reach me via email and i also like to remove things that aren't absolutely necessary so unless this website was something related to payments where clients can come on to the website and pay their invoice i'm going to go ahead and leave that off you can change the name of your invoice here so if you call your invoices bills then you can say this is the bill and then it changes up there but i like invoice so i like to distinguish between if i'm sending the invoice and asking for money then it is an invoice and if i'm receiving a request for money then it is a bill and that's how quickbooks pretty much distinguishes it as well so i'm going to keep calling this an invoice um form numbers are just what what they sound like and i think it's a good idea to keep them on because it does help you and your clients distinguish between different invoices especially if they're like the same amount and then some companies even have a policy where you you have to have an invoice number and it cannot be the same one as the previous invoice number and that brings us brings us to using custom transaction numbers i can't think of many good reasons to use custom transaction numbers and that's just basically where you're creating the form number instead of letting quickbooks automate that task for you so i personally would say in most instances to leave this box unchecked so that quickbooks can name forms for you automatically you don't have to worry about coming up with one more thing down here the billing address is grayed out because regardless of um whether you enter a street address or not there will be something in the bill to field on every invoice i mean if how can it be an invoice if you're not asking somebody for money somebody something for money um you can turn on shipping like so there's a ship to address and if this doesn't apply to you then don't check it but there are some businesses where the billing address is different from the place that receive the services or the products these terms are the payment terms so this net 30 essentially means that your client has 30 days to pay your invoice um quickbooks gives you the option of removing the due date of the invoice i don't it buys that i would say leave the due date on there because why would you want your customer to have to calculate the date that they owe you just tell them hey you owe me on this date and then there's no confusion now custom fields we're not going to get into but they are another way to capture information on your invoices so some people will use custom fields for things like a po number if their customer requires it um you might use it to keep track of the sales person who's responsible for winning the business and i personally like to use them to put a proposal number in there so i can reference something as to hey this is the document or the contract that supports the amount that i'm billing you and what i'm billing you for let's preview it okay i honestly don't think it looks different than the way it was before but humor me alright so let's click on the table now you can include an account summary on your bill um on all of your invoices by clicking on show on invoice and the account summary will appear and it kind of reads like your credit card bills where they tell you this is what you owed the last time you received our invoice and this is what you've charged since our last invoice and this is what you paid and this is what you know it was so that's what an account summary is i'm going to exclude that from the invoice but if you like it i love it included on your invoice if you want to down here we're going to get into adjusting these columns and the columns right now are date activity activity quantity rate amount like activity activity is driving me nuts so this is can i stay i cannot leave that like that i mean activity activity come on anyway so let's click on edit labels and width dates find activity i'm going to change that to product service you could say service if you're exclusively selling services matter of fact you know what i'm going to do that let's go with that service walk on the wild side and then i'm going to call this description instead of activity and since this is an hourly invoice i'm going to call these hours instead of quantity all right you can see all of that changed over here um i'm going to exclude the date column that's one thing i don't need i could include that in the dis description the data service i'm going to include the description here under the product and now that i've checked off what i want to include on my invoice i'm going to adjust the columns i i have not figured out how this works honestly like what what is the what is the science behind this how do they how do they do it how do they make it make a decision as to what's what let me see okay let's click on show more activity options you can group activity by day week month or type let's say month and then you can subtotal the groups you can collapse activity rows and quickbooks tells you right here that um if it's the same rate and description then it will collapse activity rows and you will want to do something like that just to make your invoice look neater i'm going to click on that show progress online items will add a column that shows how much you've invoiced your client from an estimate and you can check show markup on billable expenses if you're feeling especially transparent click on show billable time this will show billable time enter on your invoice so you choose whether you want to include the employee name as well as their hours and rate now let's move on to the footer but you know what let's preview it first see how it's shaping up looks pretty good i'm liking what i'm seeing you can check or uncheck here to show a discount line on your invoice and do the same for deposits check this box if you're using progress invoicing you can include an estimate summary on client invoices this keeps your client updated on how much you've invoiced them for a project and the estimate summaries will appear at the bottom of invoices if you check this box on this template message to customer on invoice here you can update the text that appears in the bottom left corner of your sales form except for estimates i'm going to add some invoice payment instructions here when you create an invoice of stars resistance types will show up by default but you can edit it on the sales form later when you create it down here i like to add a policy reminder so if you have a late fee policy a cancellation policy or refund policy add it here there's a character limit so try to be brief i'm going to leave the footer text centered with an eight point font let's take a look at it how dare you i'm gonna click on done but now we get to see me go back into the invoice that the invoice template we just created i'm gonna go see here it is this is the standard generic and then this is the one we just created i'll click on edit and go back over to content i still want to preview it again anyway we'll be able to see it soon enough so let's go ahead and click on emails now the preview window shows you what your client will see when they get an invoice or reminder from you quickbooks reminded you again this setting applies to all form styles so if you click on full details it's going to apply to every form so you can select full details if you want to see if you want your client to see everything that's on your choice in the body of their email or you can choose to only show a short summary by selecting summarize details regardless of which option you choose it's a good practice to attach a pdf of the invoice to your emails just to make it easier for your customer to view and save a copy of their actual invoice the standard email is the default email your client will receive with their invoice you can customize this message when you get ready to send an invoice to your client but i like for the standard email to be so generic that i don't have to mess with it for each client i'm going to delete the subject and body of this email so that i can add in my own language i'm also going to change this use greeting i'm going to leave it as dear call me old-fashioned but i'm only going to include the first name that's a little bit more casual now we're going to repeat that process for the reminder email but i'm going to use a different subject and message you can see the changes in the preview window here's the reminder email and here is the standard email click done to save your changes i'm going to preview it again i hope it shows up here it is okay good okay it's not bad while we're here let's make this our default invoice and you do that by clicking on edit and then make default now let's see our new invoice template in action click on new invoice i'm just going to make an invoice real quick here's the message on the invoice you can edit that if you need to if i click on customize i can change the template for this invoice notice how the new invoice automatically uses the hourly invoice template you can change it back to the standard template here create a new template or edit the one you're currently using let's click on print preview to review your invoice before sending it all right it looks good so let's click on save and send here's a generic email account that your invoices will come from but quickbooks does give you the option to link your quickbooks online account to your gmail address so that your invoices are coming from a more familiar email account for your clients and here is where the standard email comes into play now quickbooks does give you the option to edit the subject and body of your emails before they go out to your clients one thing that i like to do is add the client name to the beginning of the subject just so that i can easily search my inbox for email communications like these now if you have quickbooks payments activated you'll see down here an option to select um bank to receive payments for your bank transfer or credit card payment this is a sample company file so i don't have that activated but if you have quickbooks online and you choose active equip boost payments then quickbooks will give you the option of allowing your customers to pay you electronically before you send the invoice so the only thing left to do is proofread your email and then click send and close this is a sample company file so i can't send emails but you get the idea so that's it please like and share this video if you found it helpful and don't forget to subscribe thank you for watching bye