Discover a Simple Invoice Format for Businesses

Simple invoice format for businesses

Hello Everyone. This is Rick Grantham of Small Business Champion Bundle, coming to you from our offices here in Sunny Florida. Today I want to walk you through an invoice template, a very simple invoice template. So first off, a question for you. Have you ever encountered a situation where a client has delayed payments due to some sort of a discrepancy they have with your invoice? If the answer is "yes," and certainly that's happened with me, then it's high time that you use an invoice that's easy to understand, and that has all of the necessary elements that are required by your clients. So, first off, what is an invoice? Well, basically an invoice is a commercial document that all service providers send to their clients that outline all of the information around the services or the products that are rendered. Now, a typical invoice will contain things such as the name of your company, the contact information, so all of the ways that your customer would be able to contact you, but specifically in reference to how to give payments to you and how to ensure the products are there. It'll usually also include an invoice number and any other sort of issue dates or anything like that, a description of the services or the products that are rendered, the amount due. And here's a very important piece of that, any of the payment type of information. So what are your payment deadlines? Are you net 30 or anything like that? So what is the structure that you have in place around when payments are due or any sort of discounts that might be received if a payment is received within a certain date? Also, any sort of payment types that you may receive... s this online payment types, credit card, do you accept checks? And all of the ways they'd be able to get those payment modes to you. So, in the next part of the tutorial, we're going to pull up an actual basic invoice. We're going to show you how to input your own products and own services and to, not only navigate the template, but to also put in your own business information and get the most use out of it. So please, stay tuned for the next part of the tutorial. Thank you. Hello everyone. Welcome back to the template portion of the tutorial for invoices. I'm not going to walk you through a whole lot today on this front page, but we've got a lot to get through today. So, as you open up the main screen, first off, you will see a lot of opportunities to join the conversation. But let's get right past that and get to the invoice today, or right to the template. So, first off, you'll notice that there are two tabs on the bottom, which should be a little bit different than the templates you've seen so far. Not only is there the invoice template, or the invoice tab, which we can click on right here. We can make this a little bit bigger. And you'll see there's not only opportunities to join the conversation, but you'll see that, like in the other templates, if we click on "highlight inputs" and turn that to yes, you'll see, not only do the quantities and descriptions show up. You'll see description says, "product five," "product seven," "product three," and as you click on these, you'll see a drop-down menu appears over here on the right hand side. So, let's walk you through how to navigate this portion. First off, had you read the instructions over here, you'd see that the first place you need to go to, to set up this invoice is the invoice setup tab. So let's go there right now. The invoice setup tab is down here at the very bottom. So, clicking on this tab sets up the entire invoice for your office staff, your administrative staff, or anyone, to use. So first off, here's where you put in your product names, your service names, along with the prices. In this case, we have product one through nine, but these could very well be, I don't know, let's say you say you sell tablecloths, and we'll say that's $15. And you have napkins and we'll say you have "napkin, red" and just to be able to do this quickly, I'm going to copy and paste. And we'll just change some of the names of these. Maybe these will be "pink." This'll be "napkin, blue." "Purple." "Green." And "Black." But here's what I want you to notice, though. We have different prices for all these and you can go in and put in your own prices if you want to. You know, these can be $15 apiece, as an example. But you'll notice that it seems like there's a limitation here, right, in that this template looks like it's only set up to handle a fixed number of product names. And what I want to show you here is that you can actually add to the number of products. The way you do that, the way you add something to your drop-down list, is to come down here to the very bottom one, and we're going to type in something brand new. Let's say, we're going to say what we're selling here is something called, let's say, giraffe, just something completely out of the blue. So when you do this, you'll notice, as we hit the enter button, you'll see that the table here expanded to be able to accommodate that. And here we can type in a price, and let's say that's $99, just as an example. So in here, you can go in and put in all of your products. You can go all the way down to the bottom. Just make sure that you add to the very next row, the very first blank row that there is, so that they'll continue adding and including all of that information or all of those products, into the drop-down list that I'm about to show you. So, now that you've put this in place, you can come over here to the invoice, and in the invoice, now that we have this highlighted, certainly you can put in your company name. You can say "Small Business Champ" as an example. You can put in the company name, et cetera. You can put in who this was sold to, their name, et cetera. But I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time on this portion, because that portion is sort of self-explanatory. You would have your opportunity over here to put in your invoice number, particularly if you keep track of invoices in a sequential order. You know, invoice one, two, three, et cetera, and the invoice date. But, here's the portion of this that you can take a look at. So, we do have some dummy data in here right now, which is quantities and product numbers. I'm just going to go ahead and delete this. And when I delete that, you see the amount over here zeroed out. So, let's go ahead and put in, I want a quantity of five, as an example. And you see, the reason it's doing this "add value" here is because product five no longer exists in our product drop-down, right? Because if we go over here to invoice setup, we replace invoice five with, or product number five with, probably "napkin, blue," or something like that. So what that means is, if we come over here for our drop-down menu, and you'll see that "napkin, blue" now shows up. And the unit price of 15. Let's just go ahead and highlight these and hit the delete button. And here we can say, we're going to have 15 of... we'll put in the brand new product that we put in, that wasn't even available in the drop-down before, wasn't even available as a space in the product list, and that would be this area "giraffe," or this product "giraffe." So we put in "giraffe," that's $99. That coincides with, on our product invoice setup, the $99 we have here. We put in a brand new product, and we'll say this is "elephant," for example, and we'll say this is going to be, I don't know, $73. We can now come over to the invoice. We can hit the drop-down button here, and as we scroll down here, we see now "elephant" shows up for us as the 12. We'll say 12 elephants, 15 giraffes, and five blue napkins. So what this does, it takes the unit prices, multiplies the unit price times the quantity, and gives you your totals. Now, as you scroll down here, you can input whatever the tax rate is, and we'll say that's 7%, just as an example. Your taxes calculate and update automatically, and your amounts, too. Now, here at the bottom you could put in where you want to make your checks payable to, particularly if, where the check needs to be payable is different from the company name, which is in the header. So now that all of this is input, you can come back up here and put your "highlight inputs" to no. Let's try that again, "highlight inputs" to no, which now makes this ready for printing. At this point, you can hit the print button. This is completely customizable, right? Here, you're able to put in your own products, have those products automatically put into your drop-down list, and you didn't even know how... you didn't even need to know how to build the drop-down list. All of this was created for you, and is ready to go for your invoice. So, this template is perfect for the small business owner, particularly as you're trying to get professional invoices and professional templates and professional forms out to your customers. So until next time, be a champion.