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Writing an invoice for freelance work for Finance

you knew you were going to be wearing a lot of hats as a freelancer but you might not have realized that you also have to do your own accounting and that means sending invoices at least in the beginning an invoice is a legally binding document that details exactly how much your client owes and when it's due so it's important to get it right my name is Janessa and I've been a freelance digital marketer since 2018 when I quit my job to build my dream business using skills I learned on the internet since then I've gone on to make multiple six figures and build a business I love and now it's my mission to help other Freelancers learn the skills they need to bootstrap their way to success that includes the nitty-gritty details of running a business like sending invoices I'll be honest I remember being pretty mystified by this whole idea of sending invoices in the beginning so I wanted to make this video so you didn't get tripped up in the same areas that I did with things like what needs to be included in an invoice and how do you actually send it to the client now I'm going to talk about what needs to be included in an invoice and even show you how to create one later in this episode but first things first you have to find the right tool for the job now you have several options for tools that you can use to send an invoice and the good news is that a lot of them are free or really low cost for example Google Docs has a free invoice template and if you are using a tool like PayPal or stripe to process your payments they also have invoicing features with accounting software like QuickBooks you can also send invoices that way obviously tools like that aren't free but if you're already using a tool like QuickBooks or another accounting software you can lean on that for your invoicing needs now I've actually used all of these methods but I kept running into limitations with certain features that I needed as a service service provider and that's what led me to another tool called dubsado dubsado is a business management tool that makes it easy to keep things like invoices and contracts organized all in one place and I was really excited that debadoo had features like the ability to set up recurring invoices so that I didn't have to go into my accounting tool every month for my retainer clients they just automatically send once I set it up clients can set up autopay as well which some of my clients have loved taking advantage of and I also like that you can set up workflows which is basically where you can set up a trigger when something happens like say a client sends a contract that it will automatically send the invoice to them so there's just a lot less manual work on your end which when you are a freelancer or a solopreneur is super helpful and something else dub Auto has that I kept not finding in other tools was really flexible ways to split payments so let's say you have a project that requires a 20% down payment and 40% and then the remaining 40% later on just as an example you can set that up you can set it up to split any way and it's really simple it makes it really easy for you and the client to see exactly what's going on and if you are building by the hour dubs Auto has a time tracker feature that will automatically add the hours to the invoice so there is more manual work off your plate okay enough gushing about dubsado you're probably wondering two main things number one is it free and yes dubsado has a free trial but it's not your typical free trial you actually get to use it for an unlimited amount of time for three clients or up to three clients so you can try it out for your first few clients and make sure that it's right for you and second you're probably wondering how the heck do I use dubsado to create an invoice so I'm going to walk you through creating a basic invoice in dubsado let's go okay so I am in my dubsado dashboard and I have created a test client and a test project and we're going to send a pretend test invoice here so I'm going to go up here to invoices in the top menu and you'll see this is my invoice list but there's nothing here because we haven't created an invoice so I'm going to go over here to add and this has created the invoice now you can give your invoice a title I'm just going to call this test invoice I typically um for example for retainers will give this the name of the month and the year like December 2023 for that month's invoice for example and you're going to leave usually the number is going to be left alone because it's automatically generating that and then the date is the date that you are creating or sending the invoice so you could adjust that if you need to now what we want to do is create a new line item so the line item is going to be the item on the invoice whatever it may be so I'll say new line item and dubs AO does have the option to create packages so if you have the same packages that you're offering to your clients you can automatically program them in here but just for the sake of this example we'll say test item or test service and then you can give a description of this you could list out the bullet points of what's included whatever you need to do to describe the service and then you can adjust the quantity the price so if your price is by the hour you would set your hourly rate here and adjust the quantity to the number of hours or if you're just charging by you know a a project or for the month then you would usually say one and then say the total price just for example we'll say $1,000 now if tax is applicable you will apply that here so if you know that you should be charging tax depending on where you live to your clients you can add that in here there's also the option for discounts and then category so I have some different categories related to my business and you can set those up those are mainly so that on the back end you can see for example what percentage of your sales came from certain categories okay but for the sake of this example we're just going to have our T simple test service in here and I'll say add item now at this point there's no due date on the invoice which is essential so you need to have the due date on the invoice you also need to have the client details which because in debado it automatically carry those carries those over you don't have to worry about that so what I'm going to do is I'm going to either select if I want them to pay in full with automatic reminder emails which is awesome or if we need to do some sort of payment plan or if we need to create our own payment plan so we're just going to go this route they're all really similar to setup so I'll just go to add payment plan and add installment so you would go in here and select the due date which can be relative to for example after payment plan is applied to invoice if you want to say that it is a net 30 invoice meaning it's due 30 days after you send it to them or apply the payment plan you can do that you can set a fixed date so it could be a date that you've agreed upon with your client or if this is something that's just in the pipeline and you don't have the due date yet you can put to be determined on that and that's totally fine you can go back and update it later so for the sake of this example let's just say 30 days after the payment plan is applied and I can say I want to divide this by a certain amount or I want to make a certain percentage due on certain dates or I'm just going to say I want 100% due or you can make it a fixed amount like if you say I just need a $200 deposit on this or a $50 deposit that's what the fixed is it's a certain dollar amount so you see you've got all these options they're all really just taking you to the same place depending on the terms that you have with your clients so you can really go in here and customize this to your business okay so I'm going to go ahead and set that you can also add a reminder here so as specific amount of days after after it sends you might say hey just a reminder that your um invoice is due on this date or you can tell it to send emails after the due date so that they for example don't get any late fees so all these features are super awesome okay so I'm going to save that I'll hit save so now I have created the invoice now it's time to send it to the client so I'm going to say send I can send it via email I can copy the link if you open it in a new window which let's just go ahead and do that so you can see how this generates it's going to give you um the test client I didn't put any business information in there for the test client but normally it would have their business name their address maybe a phone number as well you do need to have that information on your invoices and then you'll see the payment terms and this is what I love about Deb Auto the client can come in here and pay now and this says pay with eCheck which is a debit which I'll get into in a minute but whatever payment methods you have set up is what your client will be able to access just by simply clicking the pay now button so if you send them that link that's exactly what you're sending them like if you want to write them out in email or I can say send via email and I just have again my test client in here and it generates an email you can customize this and when they they click this button it will take them to the invoice so super easy to use and lots of features that are amazing for Freelancers and service providers in general if you're wondering dubsado does not charge any payment processing fees or take a cut of any your payments or anything like that the only fees that you would pay are those associated with your payment processor so if you're using PayPal or stripe or Square which dubs Auto integrates into all of those then you would be paying their fees which usually is somewhere between 2 and 3% however another reason that I love dubsado is because they have an AC debit transfer option which basically means your clients are making an a payment which is their Bank connecting to your bank and sending the money which is like a digital wire transfer and the fees associated with this are much lower so usually you're paying no more than like $5 in fees no matter the size of the invoice and of course if you prefer to be paid by check you can arrange that with your clients as well and when you get that payment whether it's a check payment or a cash payment you can mark that as paid in debado that way everything is still centralized and organized in your account and you can decide which payment method you want to accept when you set up your account now remember Debs AO is free for your first three clients so you can really try it out and get a feel for the features and if you sign up using my link in the description below you will get 20% off your first month or year after you grow Beyond those first few clients if you found this video helpful make sure that you hit like And subscribe and also hit the Bell so that you get notified when I drop new episodes every Wednesday thanks so much for watching and listening I will see you all next week