Your accountant should handle billing. To keep money coming in, you want to bill quickly and often. The last thing that you want to do is miss payroll or lose employees. If you don’t, you will keep putting off creating invoices. Unpaid work will accumulate, and you’ll have wait for the client’s payment (which often takes longer than you would like). How to manage invoices
To invoice quickly, you need to have all the data in place. Then press a few buttons. You should have all the data in place and be able to invoice quickly. Next, you and your team will need to keep track of the time spent on each task. However, not all time records will be equal. You might need to do both designing and coding in order to create a landing page. These have different hourly rates. To bill appropriately, each time record should include the type of work. Clients are the same – you may charge more or less for the exact same work depending on the agreement. To make it easier to manage your invoices, you can start working on a project either on the 1st of the month or the 15th. You can also invoice every other week or when you reach a milestone. When it comes time to send out an invoice for the first batch, look at the time records that you haven’t invoiced on the project. Clients will find it easier to review your invoice if you group items by task, project, or job type. Sending an invoice should include a brief summary email explaining the benefits and whereabouts of the money. An example of this is an invoice that says “Implementing AJAX- 14 hours”. But the client will not understand it. Instead, explain it in simple terms. The site will load quicker. Reassure them that everything is going according to plan. They won’t be able to understand your work or your reasoning so they will only want to know if everything is okay. Send your invoice as a PDF to your client by email. To make sure the client pays the invoice on time, send an email reminder to them. Stop working immediately if the client fails to pay. It is better to be safe that sorry when it involves money. During contract negotiations, it is important to clearly define the payment schedule and due date. You can catch a non-paying customer as soon as possible. This will allow you to take action quickly and not waste time waiting for them to pay. You can make payments to your account through any of the online payment processors (like PayPal Stripe, AuthorizeNet and Braintree). Keep track of all invoices and their status. It’s easy for clients to forget who paid what and how much. To make sure you know who paid what and how much, keep your invoices easily recognizable. It is easy to create a standard invoice and set it to automatically go off each week, month, or quarter. This will save you a lot of time and help you be more productive. ActiveCollab allows you to manage your tasks and time and send them to QuickBooks or Xero for further manipulation. This will save you and your accountant time as they won’t need to update each other. Active Collab will automatically create an invoice based on the tracked time. Accounting software will then take care of the rest.