Discover the Standard Invoice Format for Technical Support that Streamlines Your Billing

Standard invoice format for Technical Support

in this series of videos i want to show you how to create your own invoicing system i'll start off by describing how to create the invoice itself in terms of formatting and structure also how to keep a customer database and how to keep a record of invoices and you'll see here that wherever we have an invoice that's overdue it appears in red but if we say it's paid then the red background disappears so it's a good way of tracking your invoices you can also see over here when the invoice was emailed and you've got a link to the invoices as well so you can view them now in other videos i will also go through these macros that i've created you've got a macro that will save the invoice as an excel file a macro will save it as a pdf file a macro that will automatically email the invoice to the customer a macro that will add the invoice to the record of invoices and the last macro here will clear the current invoice so that you can start a brand new invoice and it will also automatically generate the next invoice number for you if you want to learn how to create this invoice from beginning to end including all the macros run by these buttons then follow the link in the description of this video to the playlist that contains all the videos in this series okay in this video we're going to create the invoice itself and your first step is to sort out the margins and page size so in excel if you go up to the page layout tab and you can start off with your margins if we go down to custom margins you can see the default settings that these values are currently in centimeters but if they appear in inches or you want to change them you can go to file options advanced and if you go down to display you can change your router unit so i'm going to be working in centimeters in this video anyway back to custom margins now obviously you can decide for yourself what your margins are going to be for your invoice but for this invoice i'm going to say 1.5 on the left side one on the right side two top and bottom click on ok and for my paper size i'm choosing a4 if you're in the us you might want to choose letter but i'm going for a4 in this video now in a1 i'm just going to write a placeholder for your company name whatever that is i'm going to apply some changes to the font here i'm going for amesis empty pro black again you can go for whatever font you want to use and i'm going for size 20 change the font color and i'm going to merge these cells so that's from a through to f i'm going to merge across now in h 1 i'm going to type invoice and i'm going to apply the same font settings in fact invoice is going to be slightly bigger font size 26 but i'll apply the same color and i'm going to merge it across columns h and i merge and center merge across now we'll one column i so we can see the word invoice in full now underneath this row i'm going to put a little border so i'm going to right click on those cells go to format sales border so i'll choose this style border and i'm going to choose that same color as the font or thereabouts anyway and then choose this bottom border click on ok and we should have a bottom border across those cells i haven't included column j because that eventually won't feature in the invoice now column a i'm going to reduce the width of down to 3 centimeters and then in b3 i'm going to type invoice number b4 po number then date then terms and days and then i'm going to apply a related font amethyst mt pro and i'm going to widen this column 13.78 now these cells here i'm going to merge across they're going to contain the actual invoice numbers date and terms and days so having selected all those cells i go up to the merge and center drop down and i say merge across now let's select this little table and i'm going to apply some borders so right click format cells or you can use the shortcut key control one so for my outside border i'm going to use this style of border for the inside border i'm going to use this style i'm going to click on ok then i'll apply some shading to this column with the labels in and i'll change the font color to white now g h and i is going to be where you are going to place your logo so again i'll put a border around this area and i'll fill it with a gray background i'm thinking actually the borders are slight too thick in both of these areas so i'll select them both control one and i'll choose this border there we are looks a bit better now in b8 i'm going to write invoice 2 this is where the address of the customer is going to reside now it's automatically applied that background color which i'll take off and underneath the cells here i'm going to have a thick black line so thick bottom border that's from the borders button and then what i'm going to do is down to row 16 i'm going to draw a border around this area for the address block so ctrl 1 i'm going to go for this style and that's going to be on the right side the left side and the bottom click on ok that creates the address area now these grid lines are making the invoice look a little bit ugly so what we'll do is we'll go to page layout and we'll hide the gridlines now in row 18 is where we're going to start to itemize the elements of the invoice so we'll have description as our first heading and that's going to be merged across to column e column f is where we're going to have quantity then price column g vat and column h and total excluding that column i now we're going to change some column widths now column e 9.56 column f 4 column g 9.56 column h 8.33 column i 14.33 okay let's format these headings font amethyst empty pro blue background white font now we need to create a table for all the items on the invoice so i'll select from the headings down to row 35 ctrl 1 to go to format sales and i want a solid border around this table and the inside borders i'll use this style and we'll click on okay now i also need to merge across these cells now underneath here starting in row 37 i'm going to leave a little space for a custom message make sure that's the correct font and i'll select over to column e and i'm going to go for a thick bottom border and then if i select across those columns and down to row 41 control one on my keyboard i'm going to choose this as a border for the customer message and i want that on the left side the right side and the bottom over here i'm going to have space for the subtotals vat in total first of all i select this row and i want to fill that with a patterned gray background so control one i go to fill i go for this background color and i'll choose a pattern then we'll have a line for subtotal vat and then the total i'm going to format all of these cells with that amethyst mt pro font total row i'm going to apply some borders to i'll go for this top and double bottom border and i think i'll make that bold now at the bottom here we're going to have an area for company details company number vat number etc and then an area for payment details account number bank etc so in b43 i'll write company details and in g43 i'm going to type payment details i'll do some formatting here so we'll have amethyst empty pro font i'll make the headings bold change the background color to blue and the font to white and under company details i'm going to have company number then that number telephone number email under payment details account number bank and sort code if you have international customers you might have something like an iband number as well let's put some borders on this area of the invoice control one i've got borders here i'll choose a solid border for the outside and i'll choose this dash style for the inside now i need to do some merging so i'll merge these cells across and these cells and these cells here need to be merged across and so do these okay so that's the basic structure of the invoice let's add some functionality i'd like a drop down menu of terms 30 days 60 days 90 days so to do that i'll select that cell go to data over to data tools and i'm going to this data validation button and i'm allowing a list and i'm going to have 30 comma 60 comma 90. click on ok and now i've got those options in the drop down the date well you could use the today function for that that would always return the current date over here i'll type something like your logo here now in this cell here i want a drop down list of existing customers so i need to create another sheet let's first of all call this sheet invoice template and then the next sheet will call customers and i'm going to create a little table to store the customer details so we'll say customer name address 1 and i'll create several address fields we'll go across to address 5 and then we'll have an email field and i'm going to store this information in a table the reason i want to do that is because tables create dynamic ranges so if i add new customers my drop down is going to automatically pick them up so to convert this to a table you click into one of your headings go to insert table need to say that you already have headings and then you just click on okay and give the table a name so you've got a new tab on your ribbon table design table name on the left here we'll call this customer underscore list can't have a space in the name right i'll create two customers let's widen the columns a little bit okay so i want the drop down that's going to appear in b10 to pick up all the customer names that appear in column a let's go to b10 and we want to drop down here so we go to data go to the data validation button we're allowing a list this time our source is going to be not typed in but got from this customer list a2 through to a3 so if i click on ok it does give me that drop down now if i add in another customer what i want to happen is that the drop down list pick up that new customer name and it hasn't and this is despite the fact that this is housed in an excel table which does create a dynamic range the problem is is that this table is on a different sheet if it was on the same sheet as my invoice table i wouldn't have this problem right i'll just delete this now to get around this what you need to do is create a named reference to this part of the table the customer name column now to do that first of all what you do is you click into an empty cell and you say equals and then select those two cells and you can see this is the syntax that excel uses to refer to that column now i'm going to take that and copy it and then get rid of those and what i want to do is create a named reference to that column reference to do that i go to formulas name manager new and i'm going to call this customer drop down refers to i paste in what i had on my clipboard which is the way excel references the customer name list in my table right so click on ok and then close now i'm going to go back to my drop down and go to the data tab back to data validation and in this source box instead of referring to that column directly and press f3 on my keyboard and paste in that name that i've created so this still works but if i add a new customer will it pick it up yes it does so we've got our customer list sorted out ready to go for new customers what we want to happen is that when we choose a customer here that is going to display the relevant address fields in these cells now to do that i'm going to use a vlookup i'm going to look up this value in the table array customer list and i want to initially return the value from column two in that list and i'm doing an exact match i put in zero or false if i press enter it returns the first line of the address for this customer now before i can use this formula for the other parts of the address i do need to fix my reference to b10 and then i'm going to copy it down but you can see that all it's doing is just returning the first line of the address now i need to refer to these other columns so address 2 has a call index number of 3 address three as i call index number four etcetera i just need to change these call index numbers and it will pick up the rest of the address and the email address i might just format that email address so i don't want it to act as a link but i'll change its font color to blue and i'll underline it now if you find it takes the border off the bottom of that box there just select those cells control one borders tab choose the starter border which is what we applied before and we'll apply it to the bottom border so now if i change my customer from this drop down i'll get all the address details and email address for that customer now let's put a dummy item in the invoice i'll just call it some stuff so we definitely want the font to be the same as the rest of the invoice i'll change that to amesis empty pro and i think actually we'll do it for the whole table so if i put in a quantity of six say our price is 599 and that would need to be formatted with currency format and i'm going to make sure that all of these cells have the currency format applied now that i'm going to assume 20 and it's always going to be 20 so i'm going to hard code that into this formula i'm going to say price times twenty percent and then i need to copy that down the rest of those rows we'll get rid of those zeros in a moment total excluding that would be quantity times price and i'll also copy that down what we'll do to get rid of the zeros is we'll say that we only want to perform this calculation if there's a value in the quantity field i'll write little if i say if f19 is not empty it's not equal to an empty text string then perform the calculation otherwise return an empty text string over here we can do the same thing i can say if f19 is not equal to an empty text string then perform the calculation otherwise return an empty text string now annoyingly the copying down has also copied down the formatting so i'll select this whole area you can see it's got rid of the borders there so i'll just reinstate those now let's deal with the subtotal next that's going to be a sum of all the values in column i so equals sum [Music] these values here that would be a sum of all the values in the vat column and the total is going to be the subtotal plus the total vat so that's got that part of the invoice working for us down here in the company details i mean i'm not going to write the company details in or my vat number in or anything like that that'll be up to you but i guess the only thing we ought to do is change the font for these fields now it's always worth seeing how your invoice is going to print out if you go to file print you can see it nicely fits on one page it's not going over more than one page which is good so i'm pretty happy with the overall design of my invoice now i'm going to put an invoice number in and a po number let's put some more stuff i will have nine of those at 8.99 and you can see it's successfully performing those calculations which has given me a new total if i want to put a logo in here i could insert a picture i don't need to keep that background color and i don't need to keep that border either so now i'm ready to send my invoice and you're normally going to send it as something like a pdf so how do i create a pdf out of this when i go to file export create pdf and i'll just save it to my desktop and i'll say invoice for stuff and if i click on publish on my desktop there's my invoice ready to go all i need to do is attach that to an email and i've completed my invoicing now the creating of the pdf and the emailing can be automated via macros which is what i look at amongst other things in the other videos in this series if you want to learn those other things then just follow the link to those videos in the description of this video but that's all i wanted to cover in this particular video thanks very much for listening if you found it useful please give me a thumbs up subscribe and i'll see you next video [Music]