By integrating time, projects and billing, you can cut time and offer your clients more detailed and accurate invoices. Add unbilled hours, autofill client details, and get paid easily with support for multiple payment methods. Waving a carrot at customers or clients, such as offering customers a discount for paying their invoices early, can help you get paid more quickly too.
- Below this, add a table with enough rows for each line item you’re billing for, and columns labeled Item, Quantity, Price per unit, and Amount.
- If you’re a macOS user, Apple Numbers includes an invoice template under the Business section that you can select from the file browser when you launch the app.
- Hourly rate invoices can be used the same way standard invoices are, except you’ll enter hours and price per hour instead of quantity and price per unit.
- They ensure that you bill clients correctly, on time, and remove unnecessary manual work that goes into manual invoicing.
To an extent, the financial stability of small business owners and professionals rides on how well they handle client billing processes. Late payments have become a surprisingly common occurrence in the business world. According to a 2022 late payments report, a whopping 87% of businesses struggle with delayed invoice payments, which leads to time-cost repercussions and increases the accounts receivables workload. Billing can be a pain point for many small business owners who don’t feel comfortable talking about money with clients, or who don’t have the time to track down missing payments. While month-to-month invoices might be necessary for some clients, you might want to consider moving some to retainer agreements.
Issue electronic invoices
But you definitely want to get something down on paper for legal purposes. Your word against theirs won’t account for much if the two of you ended up in civil court for non-payment. This is an invoice that you receive from someone else, like a seller or supplier, requesting that you send payment. With an automated electronic invoice system, you’ll lower the chances of fraudulent or duplicate invoices and make the entire process more transparent.
- That way, you can start billing clients and grow your cash flow in the long run.
- Microsoft has several generic invoice templates you can load into Excel and Word.
- Ideal for small business owners navigating the world of international trade.
- The SPP client portal software includes an all-in-one invoicing set of features and allows you to send unlimited invoices on every pricing plan.
While they’re mostly used in the beginning and middle of the service delivery cycle, task assignments and scheduling are critical for streamlined client billing. When projects are planned, tasks can then easily feed into team schedules. As people get through tasks, assets vs inventory: what’s the difference they can log hours and add notes into the system. In selecting a billing method, or combination of methods, to pursue, you will need to think hard about the impact on your corporate culture. If you are an Agile shop running in sprints, the FFP model is very risky.
Why & How to Thank Customers on Invoices
You need to create a smooth process that not only makes transactions a breeze but also adds an extra touch of efficiency and professionalism to your financial operations. If you aren’t sure how to bill clients as retainer clients, then look to your competition or similar businesses in your industry. Visit the payment pages on their websites and see if they have any public information about their retainer costs. While billing hourly might seem simpler than trying to create retainer contracts with your clients, there are many benefits to using retainer pricing models for your business. Log time on a task, add billing, and create an invoice without leaving needing to leave Teamwork.com. So if your complete tasks daily or weekly, then consider asking them if it’s okay to bill them multiple times throughout the month.
Integrate With an Accounting Software
Billing for your consulting seems like an easy thing to do, but it’s a bit more complicated once you have to actually do it. After all, you want to get paid for your services but also show (potential) clients that they are not overpaying for your services. With this guide, you’ll hopefully have a better understanding of the available options, so you can win over more clients for your consulting business. As such, the prudent entrepreneur should carefully consider the options and be strategic about their contracting approach. Billing arrangements of the past may not continue to be good fits for modern clients. Put simply, you provide work to clients based upon a fixed price and scope.
Automated tracking
This allows you to stay up to date and stores all of your critical billing information in a single location so it’s easily accessible when you need it. You need to be flexible and adaptable in your approach, and be willing to try different things until you find what works best for each individual client. If there are any changes to the scope of work or the deliverables, then you also need to communicate these changes to the client so that they are aware of them and can approve them (if necessary). With the productized business model, the advantage is that your deliverables are clear upfront. Clients know exactly what they’re getting based on your pricing page and a detailed explanation of your deliverables.
Time management
If you find yourself creating a lot of invoices from a Google Docs invoice template (like the 12 in this article), you can use Zapier to supercharge them. Try autopopulating a Google Doc template, or use a single template to automatically create new documents. Customer/client invoices should be prepared and presented immediately upon delivery of your goods or services to the customer or as soon as reasonably possible. Not doing so can make your business look indifferent to getting paid and slow down your cash flow for no reason. Waiting to prepare your invoices at the end of the month, for example, you may be adding as many as 30 extra days to your cash flow conversion period.
This invoice type gives the client a greater amount of transparency to see how the work they’re paying for breaks down. But if you owe your client money for any reason, you may find yourself using an invoice to pay your customer. A credit invoice (or credit note) is a way to communicate returns to a client due to things like previous payment overages, rebates, accidental charges, or refunds. Not every industry handles payments the same, so my team and I made a dozen template options you can access on Google Docs to help you set just the right foundation for requesting payment. In the rare case that you are still unable to obtain payment from a client, it may be time to take legal action.