Create Your Simple Freelance Invoice Template for Production with Ease

Simple freelance invoice template for Production

hello my name is Thomas schwingle and I am a professional cinematographer based in Los Angeles I'm making this six-part series of videos for freelance filmmakers creative gig workers and small film businesses figuring out the nuances of contract work versus being a short-term employee is confusing taxes are complicated invoicing and dealing with contracts from a studio can be intimidating this is is not legal advice or professional tax advice please speak with a lawyer if you need specific consultation and please do your own due diligence my opinions and tips are not the only way to structure your plans however after many years of running my cinematography trade across multiple States I've learned a lot and often get asked by others for input I'm sharing what I know because I haven't seen a lot of other videos that do it this is video 4 of six in this series in the previous video in this series I discussed insurance and policies that you can own as a filmmaker or small film business I also mentioned contracts now let's talk about money in the first video of the series I explained the difference between being hired as an employee versus an independent contractor as an independent contractor or LLC you'll have to send an invoice to the company or Studio that hired you in order to get paid paid let's take a look at invoicing in film making it's most likely that you agreed to a rate for your labor with production before the job began you should have defined the terms of the rate as well sometimes we quote a day rate for 10 hours or 12 hours after that there could be a charge for any overtime some jobs may ask for a flat rate which means you don't get anything extra for working past the allotted range it's always a little scary to agree to work for a flat because what you are agreeing to is to not charge for extra work hours if you are on set beyond the planned shooting window early in my career I recall working up to 16 17 even 20 hours on a job for a flat rate at the time I was in my young 20s excited to be on the set of a music video for a band I liked and then we were making cool images but from my rational business perspective you could be putting yourself in a position to be used or even mildly abused depending on how hard you're being asked to work if you're being fed properly or if you're even being given breaks any crew member that is doing this for a while has their story about working ungodly long hours through the night or only being fed Little Caesar's Pizza for a single meal the number of times that Jimmy John's was my lunch I cannot tell you as an independent contractor you should be able to tack on overtime an extra compensation for work work done above and beyond the original agreement your auto mechanic isn't going to just keep trying to replace your rusted exhaust system on your car for free if it goes beyond the 3 hours that they quoted they will charge labor for the extra hours and you should be able to as well but we all know that sometimes we can find ourselves in unfair situations go ahead and do yourself a favor and go back to the first video in this series and learn about filing a wage claim your best bet is to stipulate the terms upfront during hiring for example let's say you want to charge 700 for 10 which is a phrase for saying that for 10 hours of work you will charge $700 and after that overtime will start acre the production might come back and negotiate and ask that you work 700 for 12 which is a bit of a dilution of your rate if you break down a day rate into the standard 8-hour American workday with time and a half AC crewing for up to 4 hours after the 8-hour base this dilution changes your hourly wage from $636 an hour to $50 an hour are you okay with that I've done it before depending on the job but what I'll often stipulate or reflect on my invoice is that any overtime after 12 hours will be charged at double time which is a standard calculation for anyone working as an employee for more than 12 12 hours as I mentioned in the first video you should be able to determine your own scale of pay but that is not always the case if you define the terms up front and ideally you should do this in writing through email or text then you can feel secure about what you are entering into but you also risk losing the gig if you are asking for more than the studio is wanting to pay it's a realm of negotiation there are movements within the industry to push for more reasonable hours and for making sure compensation is commensurate to the labor and hours and the unions go through these types of negotiations every few years but there are always companies looking to do things as cheap as possible and there are always going to be Freelancers who make their living by doing work for very low prices either as a way to gather as many jobs for themselves as possible by undercutting competition or they are simply uninformed about what the standard practices are you have to decide for yourself what is fair but consider those peers in your community and what is sustainable for all of us so terms have been defined up front the job has happened perhaps there were some surprises maybe the job asked if you could return some extra equipment to the rental house for them the day after WP and they agreed to pay you like $200 to handle it or if you are a small business that does a lot of work in house the shooting the editing maybe the scope of the job shifted while it was happening the client saw some cool performances and said hey let's make some 9x6 verticals for social media after all the work is done and the hours have been tallied and any extras have been accounted for it's time to invoice most of you will likely be handling your own invoicing on your own device in your own home office whatever that looks like hopefully you are a computer owner although I'm certain that there are smartphone apps out there that allow for invoicing there are services that you can contract with to handle invoicing and online portals and programs that you can run your small business through but today I'm going to talk about the basic way of invoicing from a home computer the pieces of information I offer will still apply if you end up doing your invoicing through an app or a service you should have a template for your invoice this is a fill in the blank document where you will enter in the fields that are different for each job the information that will be the same on every invoice will likely be your name LLC name address logo so those can already be on the base templ plate each time you do a new job you fill in the information that is relevant to that job at the top have your company name and logo if you made one if you did all the steps in video 2 you should be using your LLC name this puts the transaction Under the Umbrella of your business and offers that extra Legal Shield we discussed there should also be large text that states invoice so that the company receiving it knows what the document is the studio you might be getting paperwork from 20 crew members and a bunch of vendors you want the message to be clear that this is part of their payment obligations close to the top should be the date of the invoice if the studio production company pays after 30 days then in theory the clock starts ticking with the date of the invoice sometimes we can't invoice right after the job because we have another job that is keeping us busy or we're on a trip or we just let our office work slip if you do your invoice a week after after the job then it's possible that you are not getting paid 30 days after the shoot day wrapped but 30 days plus the extra week where the studio didn't have your invoice in hand if you recall the first video in the series this whole invoice situation and getting paid 30 or more days later may not actually be legal in your state if you should be classified as an employee next also near the top should be the address for your company there are a couple ways to consider this personally I sometimes have two addresses at the top of my invoice there is the llc's home address where all business documents tax paperwork and government forms go that's the office headquarters and is what is on my legal paperwork as I mentioned I operate across two states and so I use a second field as a mailing address or remit to address this is where I want the check sent let's say you have a studio office where your LLC is headquartered but you're not always there and you'd prefer to get your checks mailed home where you're most likely to be then you can list two addresses under different designations if the production has agreed to pay you digitally say venmo zel or any other non-traditional way you can add this information into the remit to field heads up though if in the near future you intend to apply for a rental property credit card or any service or product that requires you to disclose bank statements or recent income venmo and other less than professional payment services May count against you this just happened to an acquaintance of mine uh she was trying to raise her credit limit the card provider saw that many of her recent contract payments were paid to her via venmo and they didn't view it as respectable enough to increase her limits they didn't consider it proper income that may change but be warned also the top should be a unique invoice ID number this is mostly for your own record keeping but it can be helpful to both you and the company hiring you especially if they hire you a number of times in a year I've definitely had companies hire me 10 times across a year and you want an ID number for the invoice if one slips through the payment cracks you can contact the company and say hey I didn't get paid for number 006 I did get checks for 005 and 007 though I put a few letters in my own ID system usually the first few letters of the production company hiring me because it makes it easier to sort which invoice ID went to which company I include my business tax ID number on my invoice but that is a personal choice if you didn't set up a tax ID number then you may want to skip this because otherwise you'll be using your social security number and for privacy reasons you may not want to you want to have a blank field for where you will put the client information for each job this is the studio name client name whichever the address of the company hiring you and ideally some contact information like a phone number or email your invoice is being addressed to this entity the contact info is helpful for you perhaps around tax time the following year you have a paperwork issue instead of trying to dig through text or emails to find out the contact information of the company that hired you in order to solve the problem with your tax document you can just look at the invoice sometimes a person might run a production company out of their own house and searching the name online isn't going to be as helpful you should also have some fields that identify the project the reason for this goes back to the possibility of working for the production company more than once I use a project name field a project number field and a notes field let's say Soulful spots hires you in April for an Adidas commercial in June for a Nike commercial and in July for a Hoka commercial the project name allows you to say Nike shoes as a specific title for the job instead of just the in-house ID number that you use if Soulful spots is processing more than one check at a time for you they can look at the invoice and go okay this check is for Nike and the other check is for Hoka the job number is an important field to have because sometimes production companies have their own internal ID number for each SHO and they'll ask you to put it on your invoice if it's next to the project name field then it becomes easy to determine what the invoice is for this is for Nike but for the Nike shoot where we hired you on June 12th job NK 111229 not our other Nike job that also happened in June that we didn't hire you for w the notes tab can also be used for extra info if needed maybe on location in Santa Monica or at kickass stages now we get into the labor part you can have a field that defines your role on the project or the service provided and on my invoice I also list my supervisor which allows me to State under whose Direction I was working if you're a grip you can list the key grip if a cinematographer you can list the director the bulk of the invoice is going to be the layout of dates the rate time performing the labor and ideally a short description of the services provided I know seconds ago in my narration I said you were hired in June for this madeup invoice example and printed here it has December dates just ignore that I'm not typing up another invoice date should come first these are the actual days you worked on the project it denotes the calendar commitment to the project after that the days can be broken down into the rates either for the day itself or for hours if OT was agreed to and performed you may have a way that you want to further break this down you can also provide a description of your services I suggest doing this and being fairly complete it can show the production company what you brought to the table for them and let's say you get a call 4 years later from the same company and you're trying to recall that name is familiar what did I do for them how did that job go you can look at your old invoice and recall the work you did for them last time finally this will all get tallied into a final number which is what the company owes you there should be a clear total at the bottom and make the final number bold and big as for when you get paid that is usually up to the production company's discretion but you can try to impose a deadline since you are the contractor they hired I put net 30 below my total which is a way of saying that the total net of this invoice is due within 30 days net 14 is worth trying to see if you can get paid within 2 weeks but prepare for disappointment and again again I reiterate see the first video in this series about timely payment there's some variations I need to discuss some contractors I know will add some text at the bottom usually these are extra terms some people might stipulate that if the invoice is late not paid net 30 there might be a late fee assessed like 2.5% to 5% per month late in my experience most production companies aren't going to honor this but if you want some extra teeth in your invoice you can try it last year I had a production company that was chronically late paying me on one job in particular it was over 60 days since IID sent the invoice so I ended up resending the invoice but I tacked on a 2.5% late fee to the total in red text they got back to me almost immediately they didn't pay the 2.5% fee but they did Rush a check into the mail after getting my new higher invoice your mileage may vary if you end up renting your personal equipment onto a job keep in mind that some states legally require you to impose a sales tax for renting and leasing tangible property which you collect and remit to the state it's complicated and not often understood by small contractors I know about it for the states I work in and if someone is renting my camera or piece of gear for me I often end up sending a whole invoice separate from my labor invoice it's essentially a separate rental invoice to template I have for any equipment I am personally renting out and that is where I handle any sales tax I'm required to collect by the state in which I am working I'm not going to get into that here it's perhaps best suited for its own video down the road but if you ever get audited and they discover that you are renting equipment and not collecting sales tax you might be in first surprise so we've covered a basic invoice after you fill it out you send it to the production company in the way they requested you will often be asked to send along a form W9 as well which is required when making more than $600 from one employer within a year on your end in your home office you should have a system to keep track of your invoices if you did six jobs in one month and are thus expecting to receive six checks in the near future you want a way to keep track of what is still outstanding and what has already come in you can use spreadsheet software or some app that helps you keep track ultimately you want to be armed with some information one what is your cash flow do you have some big checks coming in so you know you can pay next month's credit card bill the other important piece of information is knowing how much you invoiced for each month because it helps you with taxes I mentioned in a previous video that when you get paid as a contractor you must pay in a portion of that income as taxes because your employer is not doing it for you depending on how much you make you may have to pay this each quarter or if you're really successful each month month by having a spreadsheet or a piece of software that is keeping track of your invoices each month you can be better prepared to know how much money you might be paying out that month or that quarter for your income tax because if you underpay in a period you will be charged a fee by the government I'll explain taxes in the next video thanks for watching invoicing is kind of this huge thing we have to deal with and we're not always taught the way to do it so I hope you found this helpful I'm here to just try and give back and help young creatives and and help you protect yourself so you can succeed and make cool stuff and you know not get screwed [Music]