Create Your Self Employed Contractor Invoice Template for Planning Effortlessly

Self employed contractor invoice template for Planning

in this video you'll learn how to access the free invoice template in Google sheets so that you can start billing clients right now hey guys I'm James and welcome to accounts and stuff the channel that teaches you all there is to know about accounting and bookkeeping if that's your thing then hit the subscribe button so you don't miss out on any of the new weekly videos today I'm going to show you how to create an invoice in Google sheets for free this is really handy if you're self-employed or you run a small business and you don't have any accounting software like QuickBooks or 0 to help you create invoices and track them easily Google's got your back with this simple and convenient invoice template that you can access right now from wherever you are and and I've created my own invoice template that you can use for free as well I'll drop a link to it down in the description there are a few reasons why you might want to use this one over the Google sheets invoice template but I'll dive into those later in this video but now let's begin I'm going to show you how to access the free invoice template in Google sheets to do this you're going to need two things an internet connection and a gmail account since you're watching this on YouTube you probably have both already but if not pause this video now and head over to gmail.com to sign up she'd only take you a couple of minutes right so now they're all on the same page I'm going to show you how to get your hands on that free invoice template in Google sheets we do that by clicking on the Google Apps icon which you can find in the top right corner of your Gmail or Google search page it looks like a three by three grid from here you can access your Google Drive which is a free cloud storage service that Google gives out to all of its users super useful and I recommend using it to backup all of your important files and photos if you aren't already I think we all get about 15 gigabytes of storage for free which is not bad at all from here you click on the new button in the top left and hover over the arrow next to Google sheets to create a new sheet from a template when you click on this it brings up the template gallery which you can scroll through until you reach the section titled work and voila the first option is the invoice template click to open and here we are the Google sheets invoice temple you can customize this however you like because we've got all of the important invoice builds like your details the customers details invoice number date description quantity and amount the only thing that's really missing here is the sales tax but we can add that in manually if this all looks a bit alien to you then don't worry I made a video explaining how invoices work already but you can find up here in the corner this 10 place is great but I do have an issue with it since your clients will open and read your invoices they're actually a reflection of your brand so my problem with this template is that the Google branding is very distinctive so your client might be able to tell right away that you've pulled it from Google that might make your business come across a bit amateur which is definitely not the impression that we want to give for this reason I encourage you to play around with the appearance of this invoice to reflect a theme of your business alternatively to help you out I've created my own cleaner more minimal version of the Google sheets invoice template and you can have it for free I've put a link to it down in the description this template includes the tax field which was missing in the standard Google version and to make things easier for you I've included the checklist in the first tab to make sure that you've got all of the bases covered before you send the invoice out just change the font update the logo and you've got a professional-looking invoice that aligns with your brand I encourage you to give this one a try and see what you think the beauty of invoicing with Google sheets is that the invoices are stored in the cloud so you can access them from any machine by logging into your account you can also share the invoice with other people that you work with and allow them to make changes if necessary or not if you want to keep it private it's your choice I recommend making an invoice folder so you can keep them all together using a basic file naming structure like invoice number customer and amount to keep things organized when you're ready to build the customer simply export as a PDF attach it to an email and send or you can print it out and post it if you're old school this way of doing things is really useful if your business is just getting started but at some point is worth making the lead to using some kind of cloud accounting software like quickbooks online quickbooks offers you professional templates tracking payment reminders and a whole bunch of other useful features there were save you time and hope you organize your finances if you sign up using my link in the description then you'll get 50% off for the first 3 months thanks for watching if you found this video useful give it a like share it comment subscribe if you haven't already as always if you've got any questions let me know down in the comments there are new videos coming out every week here on accounting stuff see you next time [Music]