Create a Simple Consulting Invoice Template for Higher Education Effortlessly

Simple consulting invoice template for Higher Education

hey everyone it's Brian again and in this video I'm going to show you how to create and customize an invoice template using Microsoft Excel and obviously once you have this template you can save it and reuse it as many times as you'd like for your own business so at the end of the video I'm going to give you a link to download two free templates that I'm going to show you in this video so you won't have to actually do much work to create your own you can just customize these two templates that I'm going to go over with you today and make some changes as you see fit the download link will ALS Al give you access to the hosted payment link tool called simply pay me that I'm going to show you and talk about in this video too because there's a special payment link function in these templates that I'm going to go over with you that link function will give your customers the ability to just click on your invoice once you send it to them and you've saved it to a PDF or they can click a link in your email copy and pay the invoice through a secure hosted payment page so again stay tuned to the end and I'll give you that link so here we go I have two templates to go over with you today and the function functionality is similar but they are slightly different layouts and format so you can choose the one that you like best so here's template one as you see in the template it's more than just basic functionality there's a lot of pre-coded form fields that make it easy for you to just fill out text fields and then have Excel do all the hard work with the cell references and calculations this is how it will come to you when you download the template for free so you can start with the basics by changing out your logo just right clicking on it and selecting change picture find the image logo on your desktop and upload it to the document you can also just come right over here to the insert Tab and insert a new image and then resize it ingly the invoice number is listed here and this header is fixed so that when you scroll down the top stays fixed so this button right here is also going to be fixed and I'll come back to that in just a minute the total of the invoices in red and autop populates so you can leave that just as it is you can type in the date and the due date here their standard date fields then come over to the select your customer cell and the first line is a drop-down box and these are referenced from page two so if I come back up to this purple button and click on it it takes me to the page which it has a simple list of the customers you can get there also by just clicking down at the bottom under the Excel sheets tabs the customer information is self-explanatory so just add and delete customers or copy and paste them from another spreadsheet once they are listed click this button or return to page one with the tabs at the bottom and select the customer using the drop- down menu just like this you'll notice that the cell references autop populate everything from the customer info sheet so there's nothing more you'll need to enter the next section is where you enter your products and services first you have quantity and number of units which you can change with the drop down and for most of you I think you'll just leave it as units that's what I use most often put a product description in and type the cost per unit and the total column autop populates everything for you repeat the process for as many products and services as you see fit then come down to the bottom and you'll see the totals and payment details and if you want to add sales tax click the sell and choose the applicable tax from the drop-down menu the payment details and other info section can be customized with your information or with your company information and their standard text field so just type in your contact information and make them look the way that you want them to the final thing that you can do is add your payment link for your client or customer to pay the invoice some accounting softwares have built-in payment options when they're mailed out so why not give yourself that option with simple invoicing too so this button here says click to pay the invoice and this is where you can insert the payment link to the hosted payment page that's linked to your merchant account now the service that I'm using here is called simply pay. me which is a hosted payment page and invoicing link tool so it's perfect for this application you can try the service for free by going to Simply pay. me and creating a free account so you can follow along with what I'm about to show you right now the service also allows you to link your stripe and PayPal accounts to Simply pay me and there's even an option for a premium merchant account with card connect which gives you lower processing rates so for now just know that simply pay me gives you a link that your customer can click on and it takes them to a page that looks similar to this where they can just instantly pay your invoice so I'm going to grab the payment link and come back to my invoice and go to page number two paste the link right here in this box the green payment button on page one references that cell that you just pasted your link into and I'm going to save this invoice to PDF in just a minute but the second option to attaching your link to this payment button is just to rightclick on the button and select edit hyperlink come down and paste the link right here the URL just put it right in this box and click okay to save then it's always a good idea to save the the main Excel document to make sure that all of the changes are picked up the last step is to come to file export or file save as and choose the PDF option once you do you can open the PDF and test the link by clicking the payment button once it checks out you're ready to email it to your customer in the email it's also a good idea to include the payment link right in the text of the email so that it's easily clickable for your customer no one likes outstanding accounts receivables so the easier you make it for your customer to pay the invoice that you're sending them the better it is for everyone template number two is laid out in a similar format to the first template but there are some differences that I'll go over with you start with simple customization of the templates Itself by again adding your logo and your company info update the date invoice number customer info if applicable and this is just a unique identifier specific to your company if you want to use it and the due date of the invoice the bill two info for your customer is referenced in the exact same way from page number two just like I showed you in the first template that we just went through if you don't like that functionality by the way you can of course just delete this cell reference and type all the fields in for each customer that you use to invoice so you can make everything manual if you'd like come down to the description and type in your service or your product title the amount column on this template is not a reference so just type in the dollar amount that needs to be build into the amount column if it's a taxable item you'll just put an X right here in this column and it'll autop populate the text for that item on that line so on a single invoice you can add products that are taxable and also include items for something like consulting services that you might not want to include tax on you can also add a dollar amount to the other field for something like shipping and handling for example which of course is not a taxable item Additionally you could just list shipping and handling as a separate line item at the top if you'd like just make sure you leave it unchecked so that that's not taxed now if you're going to use this template to invoice for your your services versus products you might not even want to have the taxable column at all in that case let's modify this template with some different cell references you can just change the taxable column to quantity column for example so I'll just type in qty then if you do that you might want to add another column for unit price so everything totals up correctly so I'll go ahead and do that and in your template click here and select merge and center so that it unlinks the title column like this then I'll copy this column header so it matches the font and color and paste it in here so now I have units quantity and amount the amount will be the subtotal for each line item the cell reference that you'll type into the amount column is equals then Arrow over or put your mouse in the cell here and click it'll populate that cell number and hit the asterisk key for multiply and then you use your mouse to click in that same row under the unit price field and that cell number will get added to our formula then just click enter and save so for each line item that you add you want to have this cell formula in the amount totals column so the grand total at the bottom calculates properly so hover over your mouse over the bottom right hand corner of the cell that holds the formula we just created and click and hold and pull down the next two or three columns like this you'll notice that it puts a dash in the columns that don't have values in all of the columns required so if there's a formula in the amount column you want make sure that you have all of the other areas filled out like quantity and unit price for that entire item row then just fill out the number of line items that you want on this invoice and delete the other references in that amount column by clicking in the sell and just hitting the delete key then if you're not going to be invoicing for taxable items you can also just delete these cells from the total section and leave the rest there the template will calculate your total and you'll still have your other field to use if you'd like to use it finally you can insert your simply pay me link by using the payment link cell on page two of this template or you can just rightclick and choose the edit hyperlink and paste your link in and then click okay just like I showed before save it to PDF just like the last template and then you're ready to email it out to your customer so that's both templates and you can download them now for free by clicking the link in the description box if you have questions about the Excel templates the cell references simply pay me or anything else in this video please comment below and I'll get your questions answered as as quickly as I can additionally if you found this video helpful please subscribe to the channel if you're new to the channel I publish tutorial Style videos that are on topics of making the process of collecting payments and getting paid simple and efficient I talk about payment software tools payment gateways CRM software General merchant account topics how to set up payments on your website and a bunch of other stuff all related to Payment Processing for your business I'm Brian Manning and I'll see you next time