Create Your Teaching Invoice Template for Financial Services

Teaching invoice template for Financial Services

you're in dire need of an upgrade systemic top to bottom 100 point restoration that's why i'm here how do you invoice someone how do you put together an invoice and what does that invoice need to have on it you spent the time and the effort doing the work so it'd be pretty good to get paid right and you want to get paid much sooner rather than later i personally haven't had any problems with this while self-employed but the data out there suggests that millions of hours get wasted every year in chasing invoices and that it's quite common to have outstanding invoices where you're owed money now these aren't reasons to not start a side hustle or business but there are definitely ways to make the process easier to make it more likely that you'll get paid and on time i also want to suggest some ways that you could earn money and maybe skip invoicing altogether now the first invoice i ever had to do i just typed from google images into a word doc so i looked at what invoices tend to look like and and kind of worked out from comparing other invoices i think i was probably also dealing with invoices incoming at work so i kind of worked out from there what most invoices should have on them to to qualify as an invoice that you'll actually get paid if you prefer using excel for anything it's possible to create a template in excel too just generally creating templates for yourself in a side hustle business of any documents that you use over and over again it's good to have uh something like that that you can just use as your your sort of blank slate if there's things that you do over and over or there are already made alternatives out there so i'll try and put a link so that if you need someone else to to give you a template if you really don't know how to where to start you'll be able to refer to that instead an invoice you'll usually include the date uh reference number so again for the very first invoice i ever sent i think i really went out there and i put invoice number one or something like that you want to put on there the service or the product that you're selling and the date that you supplied that uh your rate and the total if you're vat registered you'd put v8 on there if it's your very first time selling anything you're probably not doing the kind of revenue where you're vat registered but i'll link to the gov uk checklist um so that you can see what the government advises you to include on an invoice and you can also follow the links there about whether you need to think about v80 or not you'd also put on there your contact details so a business correspondence address a business name if you have one and also the contact details of the person who needs to pay so that it's clear who you're invoicing or which business you're invoicing and it should also normally say how to pay you so for instance bank account details if you're expecting a bax payment or any payment methods that you don't accept like checks for instance um currency can be an important thing to put on there if you're working with international customers you can also put on their late payment penalties so if someone isn't going to pay you on time it might say on the invoice that you charge them a certain percentage of your of the original invoice and it's also common to put on their net terms so again the gov dot uk website will have the the latest information about what you can what's enforceable basically if you don't put any net terms on there then it's silent payment terms so basically the other person can assume that they've got 30 days to pay you most of us wouldn't have the time or the resources to change uh payments really often so like if you do have the time to chase someone after only seven days i wonder if you'd be better off sending automatic email reminders instead and using that time to complete more projects because otherwise any job that you do is going to be costing you more than you initially thought if you're not counting the hours that you spend chasing payment as well so xero have data suggesting that the shorter the payment term the quicker the people that use their bookkeeping bookkeeping software do get paid so for instance their data shows that when you put seven days on your invoice as the timeframe in which you expect to get paid you're most likely to get paid after two weeks if you put two weeks you can generally expect to get paid after three weeks if you put 21 days are you seeing a pattern forming here it's quite likely you'll get paid after around 28 days and so on and so it's not a bad idea to put short payment terms on an invoice of say seven days um it does seem to spur the other person on to pay you quicker but you also might not have the the time and the resources if they don't pay you very quickly to actually chase that up and it's you know as far as like legal recourse which most of us again don't have the time the resources to be suing someone after after a couple of days when they haven't paid you 30 days is it's kind of a good rule of thumb you can also check your bank account for invoicing capabilities now not everyone decides that they even need a business bank account depending on how much they're selling you can get a business bank account for free i think they're a really good idea for keeping income and outgoings separate from anything else that you do even if you're not doing a great amount of money with a side hustle um and from a tax point of view again don't panic like if you're like wait i haven't thought about the tax implications either it's okay we can tackle that in another episode if you like i i think someone has submitted a question actually about what to do about tax but if you do need to make a declaration for tax having a a separate bank account for your business income even if it's a very small side hustle just will probably make life a lot easier for you and like i said you can get business bank accounts for free and some of those might have a feature for you where they'll help you to generate invoices and some of them come with free bookkeeping software that allow you to generate invoices very easily now again bookkeeping software is something where you might think oh gosh this this is another thing that i need i just wanted to sell a few things on ebay a couple of times a month or you know i just wanted to sell crafts on etsy or whatever it is so this is meant to make your life easier rather than harder and there is some free bookkeeping software available so it doesn't have to be an extra expense either you might feel that you aren't going to have enough sort of going in and out at huge volumes that you that you're going to have difficulty tracking it in the slightest but basically bookkeeping software does usually like help you month to month keep track of of your expenses and your income within a side hustle or business now someone suggested wave to me but the person who suggested it's canadian so anytime you get a recommendation for something it's great that we have an international community online it's great that we can look things up on youtube and whatnot and and in podcast but do double check that any recommendation is relevant for your locale they were using it to invoice coaching clients and then collecting signatures on their contracts with so that's a way to get signatures digitally just because you're sending an invoice doesn't necessarily mean that you're dealing in long contracts that require a signature as well so don't worry about that if it's not applicable to you if you're not sure if it's applicable to you give me a shout i'll talk about when you might want contracts in place just check the limitations of any software based on your needs basically the world is really your oyster online so i don't see why anyone shouldn't be thinking about catering to an international audience unless you're it's because you're offering something that's like very hype a niche for something local to you again that's something i can talk about in another episode if you want to talk about niches and sort of targeting a product or service someone was talking to me about how they couldn't get their first client and they were building websites in their local town in south africa and i was like dude dude being you know a perfectly acceptable technical way to refer to someone in a professional setting i said dude we're having this conversation thousands of miles apart and you're building websites on the internet why don't you market yourself online to to anyone in the world and build websites for someone no matter where they are because you could do that so you don't have to limit yourself but there is a consideration there which is to do with i mentioned you might want to put on an invoice uh what currency you're expecting payment so and if you are going to use bookkeeping software just something to be aware of uh if that if it is going to be a common thing that you're going to be invoicing in different currencies or a different currency to your currency last time i checked um quickbooks for the self-employed i don't think they were handling multiple currencies uh zero i think you can only i think it's pronounced zero right it's spelled x e r o i'll put a link in the show notes xero can only how else would you pronounce it anyway they can only change the currency or you can only change the currency on an invoice with them i think if you're paying for the highest tier in a previous episode i talked about tiered pricing when you're either selling products and services or paying for services within a side hustle or business so i can link to that too if you need some help kind of evaluating that you can use it to your advantage for sure a free agent i believe does let you handle different currencies and that's available for free with certain business accounts if your content creator in particular relying on affiliate income a lot of affiliate programs are based in the us and only deal in dollars so that's something to consider i guess if you deal in sponsorship too if you're a content creator um you you might be invoicing to get paid for that so basically i would just check before you sign up to anything whether that bookkeeping software is going to do what you need it to do and i'll try and link to an invoice template if you want me to create templates for anything by the way that you think would be helpful just let me know i'll see what i can do if you want printables for something it would probably be for the mailing list only that only seems fair um i make notebooks on amazon for funsies and i've always said if anyone wants like a custom interior not for invoicing i don't think it would be like a little invoice book because they're that's usually all done mainly electronically uh it would probably be for like gold tracking or income tracking if you don't have a huge amount of income and outgoings to keep track of there is one other way to try and speed up payments when you're invoicing and that is if you do offer some kind of discount for early payment or paying upfront and if you're worried about sort of underselling then it just means that you would kind of like bump up your prices in the first place so that whatever whatever you charge for that early payment or upfront payment is sort of what you want to be charging anyway and that can also act as like a form of anchoring if you have a higher price for late payers or anyone who wants to pay in installments that usually acts as an anchor where customers kind of want to go the route that's going to cost them less anyway and it just makes everyone's life easier i definitely consider a route where you deal with invoices a little as little as possible anyway so anything where you could have like an online shop front and take payment up front instead so if your service is that you're a freelancer who makes deliverables could you create a template pack that people pay for instantly and download instead especially if you're providing the same service over and over again and if the the actual work that you're doing doesn't change that much uh from sort of business to business or person to person if there's a way to make it one size fits all then there's opportunities there to make that a bit more passive and focus on selling that rather than having to complete individual projects freelance writers can sell packages of work that's paid for up front so if you said you were going to deliver a certain number of words over the next three or six months as opposed to just writing one piece or that you're going to deliver all the writing that they want within the next month but with the idea that they're paying so that they've got the content that they can drip feed after that uh out over a time frame that they want of many months even if you're like a graphic designer who does custom designs you could sort of turn that into a package product where you have some fixed prices and you get a set amount of assets in return for that so maybe it's like a you get a poster design a flyer design and a logo of some sort and the only variable is that you're making you know a pretty logo relevant to each customer within a set time frame after they've paid but they pay up front and they sort of know with as little back and forth as possible what the fixed items are that they're getting in return for that you can still have pricing tiers with something like that too maybe not right away but you can have tiers where the customer either pays for like the entire kit in caboodle or they're just paying for a couple of elements if you're a person-to-person service provider you can turn that into packages also so like if you provide coaching consulting training those are things that can be turned into memberships uh that paid for up front with like an annual fee or a quarterly fee there's a whole other world there to do with administrating if you go down the route of monthly payments so i wouldn't swap invoicing for a monthly payment plan headache if you're going to try and set up a subscription business today or tomorrow because the common wisdom is that yes you might attract more people if you let them pay little and often but it also eats into your profit anyway because customers who pay little and often are more likely to miss payments altogether and and that can put you back to square one there's also a whole debate to be had about there about the the quality of the customer it just comes down to psychology and the difference in behavior when we're invested in something if we've paid once with a large fee attached we kind of treat that differently than we do if we've just paid like a small monthly cost for something but basically every time you have to send a single invoice there's a huge opportunity cost because that's one and done you've got to then look for more work or convince that client to buy another project from you so that's where anything with like a subscription element or an ongoing package can really help with retention and mean that you're not constantly either seeking out new clients or trying to resell to people who've brought from you before and on the training side courses with a one-time payment through a course platform or another option but they're probably not best for someone just starting out who's never offered services one-on-one or successfully sold a product before i think lots of people think that they're the first way to make money online and there's there's lots there's lots of information out there about passive income online that would try and get you to go straight into selling courses uh and convince you that it's 100 passive and i don't think that's really true and i think there's probably some other things that have to come first i'll mention clarity.fm in previous episode regards offering flexible coaching consulting or any anything where you're being paid to answer questions basically that's a service where you can do it quite ad hoc and there's no invoices required because the client they pay with their their credit card details they would put that into clarity they're paying for say an hour up front but because clarity has their credit card if you go over time it just sort of automatically bills them the the extra per minute basically and for you to get that payment you don't have to invoice clarity you just request payment into your account to paypal that's how it works at the moment obviously they might it's always uh worth checking to see if the process has changed a bit some things get better some things go away the big trade-off with course platforms or membership platforms is that if you're putting in a system in place like that that usually comes with its own fees but they are also a way to retain any business you generate or automate that a bit better so i think the calculation to do is what does it cost you every time to chase an invoice or what does it cost you every time you don't get paid so what does it cost you in time but also you know have you run into financial consequences in the past like falling back onto credit card debt or overdraft charges every time you don't get paid and i would weigh that up with paying to use a service or a platform that might actually make collecting income easier especially if you have that money up front and you know that you've got a bit more of a a consistent income that you can rely on definitely with things like subscriptions for freelancers that recurring income can give them a bit of peace of mind if they know they've got a handful of people who pay the same every month for the service that you provide but it also removes a lot of the hassle associated with invoicing now like i said don't let it put you off starting everything new that we do has its challenges how big the challenge is is really just down to our mindset and there are lots of things out there that will make it easier for you i think more than ever brands and platforms they are trying to make life easier because they really you know their business depends on you succeeding and when i started my blog and the podcast i was really just amazed at how much things have changed even in the last few years and how sort of low the barrier to entry is getting to if you want to put out content and things like that with each service that i sign up for i'm always like wow they're making this really frictionless and and so it should be um and there's lots of services out there that can make your life easier if you're trying to do something new if you're already paying for certain services as well so if you already have a business or side hustle that collects email addresses for instance so that you can communicate with a mailing list of customers if you're already making that payment i'd have a look at if they can help you in this area in terms of delivering services without having to be sending out these individual invoices and and having to sort of chase custom all the time on an individual basis so for instance i use convertkit as my email service provider and they've been testing out convertkit commerce that should get rolled out to the uk in future uh hopefully not too far away um obviously if you're listening to this in the future this might be a very established thing but they just started it in the us and it's a way for their users to deliver digital products in an integrated way especially if that product would usually be delivered by email anyway um like if it's some kind of like ebook or uh templates like i mentioned you know any kind of uh graphics something like that otherwise you might be paying for an email service provider and then maybe you're using a separate website on top of that to try and actually deliver what you're offering you might be paying all of these separate fees convertkit commerce's fees so far look very competitive given the choice between that and things like gumroad i think in future it's going to be a no-brainer for anyone who's already using convertkit it might also challenge things like patreon so patreon their big selling point i think has always been that you only pay fees to patreon if you're getting paid so if you don't sell anything in a month you don't owe patreon anything uh whereas some other services would charge you monthly to use them regardless of whether you actually make any sales and this is really off-putting right but again if you were using patreon and convertkit or another email service provider and you're paying to use one of those things already it kind of makes sense that you would just stay in-house instead of adding all of these extra accounts that you have to manage and just try and do everything in an integrated way in one place i'll put a link in the show notes if you want to know more about convertkit anyhow but finally the other way to look at this is if you really can't see a way to work without invoices and you're in profit you could hire a virtual assistant to send out your invoices and chase payments for you even if they only work a few hours a month doing that so if paying them makes a significant difference to what you get paid when you're able to collect payments then do that that can also be useful for difficult conversations because it provides a buffer between you as the professional and whoever owes you money so that if you do need to work with them again in future there's no animosity in the meantime if you need to remind them to pay there's one last thing so i have an ebook available to email subscribers on my blog and in that i talk about upper limit problems i'll also link to the book that introduced the idea of upper limit problems to the world because i think you'll find that useful too if you have trouble sending invoices in the first place or chasing payment you might have an upper limit problem so you're afraid to earn money because it means that life will change or it will add some kind of responsibility for you don't be afraid just click send i'm autistic i love a good routine but if i can say don't be afraid of change just click the button what's your excuse go forth [Music] you