Wasting Money on Invoices
Being a freelancer can be an amazingly rewarding experience, while being an incredibly stress inducing and mind numbing experience. In addition to juggling clients, being your own IT support and customer service desk, and taking care of those little secondary things like completing projects and finding clients, you have to deal with billing…namely invoices.
I’ve used all sorts of time management and accounting software and from a design standpoint, all of their automated invoices suck. Yep, every single one. The layout of the invoices in those programs are rarely end user friendly: the ability to modify the invoice to match your company’s image and brand, especially fonts, is very limited and, generally speaking, the invoices aren’t nice to look at at all — which sometimes makes the difference between that invoice getting paid in a timely manner or whether it gets forgotten and ignored for weeks. The only real plus in using the invoices provided with software is that the programs do all the nasty calculations for you. Numbers can be evil for those on the arty side of things.
I wanted to find a way to make an invoice that I could customize with graphics, that would allow my choice of fonts, that would do any calculations for me, that could be easily adapted to both billing and quoting, and, most importantly, was as automated as possible.
I went through the list of obvious page layout software (InDesign, Quark) and I realized there wasn’t a simple way, that I know of at least, to do real time calculations. Beyond the calculations, though, InDesign did almost everything else I needed: fonts, graphics, easy text editing. I’d still have to manually enter the date and the invoice number, which I’d have to keep track of somehow. The one program that I knew could be programmed to calculate things was Microsoft Excel (if you’re broke, check out NeoOffice, the free and open source Microsoft Office emulator for Mac). I decided to design the layout in InDesign, using tables, and then use Excel to make all the calculations of the hours and dollars which I would then copy and paste into InDesign.
At first this seemed pretty logical, but logic doesn’t always equate to efficient or intelligent. I spent a lot of time messing around with the calculations and pasting them in InDesign. Then, of course, I had to tweak and edit all the tables in InDesign so that the page would look decent. Tables in InDesign are not fun to play with; they can be very counterintuitive in many ways and are mostly just a pain in the ass. While I was fusing with the tables one day, it dawned on me that not only could I set up the same table layout in Excel, but I could also add graphics and change the font and font colors.
Since my time management system automatically tracked my hours and rounded to the minute, all I needed to do was drop those numbers into Excel and let it do all the calculations. Of course this isn’t as easy as doing it all in one step, but it’s a lot better than using three programs and copying and pasting between them all. Also on a Mac you can print directly to PDF from the print dialog box, which is awesome because you can email your client a copy of the invoice the same day you make it and then physically mail them a copy.
So here are some automated Excel goodies, if you decide to try this out yourself:
Date
In the cell where you’d like the date type:
=Today()
When you open the invoice it will always have today’s date automatically displayed.
Invoice numbering system
My invoice numbers look like this:
00-36915-01
I don’t use a typical invoice numbering system, because I couldn’t find an easy way to automatically keep track of the last invoice number. Instead I use the same “=Today()” function from the date, but I format the cell it’s in to read it as a number (I think the option looks like “-12345″). This doesn’t allow for consecutive invoice numbers, since it literally counts the days from a 0 point in the past.
For example, if you make an invoice on Monday, that happens to be invoice #40000, and then the next invoice you make is on the following Thursday, 4 days later, that invoice is going to be #40004 instead of #40001. The invoices will still be sequential, they just won’t be consecutively sequential.
Of course there are days when you have more than one invoice you need to send to multiple clients and you don’t want to have two invoices with the same number, so I added “-01″ to the end of the formatted number so if such an event does occur (and it has) I can just increase that number for each invoice. I decided to add an additional “00-” at the beginning of the number, purely for visual aesthetics…I’m a geek that way.
Adding it all up
Using Excel’s “=SUM()” function, for individual and multiple cells, makes quick work of adding up your hours/minutes and converting those to dollars.
Payment Terms line
This is my favorite, because it adds a nice touch to the invoice and it’s totally automated. I use this:
=”Please submit payment by “&TEXT(NOW()+30;”mmmm dd, yyyy”)&” (Net 30)”
Which looks like this, when it’s printed:
Please submit payment by April 23, 2008 (Net 30)
Basically the formula adds 30 days to the current date and outputs the corresponding future date in month, day, year form.
What It Looks Like
Here’s a sample of what a printed invoice looks like, using Excel:
I’ve used this form of invoice for about a year now and it’s been a time saver. My invoice numbers are automatically generated and my billing is calculated instantly based on the hours I input. Most importantly, I can make any adjustments I need and have it match all my other business collateral, even if that changes in the future.
Tags: billing, Business, calculation, Design, dollars, Excel, hours, InDesign, invoice