Every professional VA has their own style of doing things, including invoicing. I know some use software to track their time, I use a good old fashioned .txt doc and Paypal Please comment back with your own methods and examples of what works for you. )

I invoice every other Fri on net 14 terms. This means that I give the client 14 days (from the day I send the invoice) to make payment. When I total an invoice I send a copy of the invoice document to the client via email. I also send a payment request via Paypal with the basic breakdown of the invoice in the 'notes' section.

I also keep a running XL sheet of ALL invoices with columns for
Date sent
Total
Client name
Payment method
Due date
Notes
Running total
Monthly total
Yearly total

When I send a fresh invoice request I note the information on the XL sheet and highlight it in yellow until it is paid. I have too many clients now to keep in mind all the invoices I have out at any given moment and the XL sheet makes it easy to check who owes what and when.
It also makes it really simple for me at the end of the year when I want to calculate taxes as well as lets me quickly compare how I'm doing this year compared to last year at the same time or this month to last month, etc.

As soon as an invoice is paid I remove the highlight from that line of info on the XL.
Also, every single invoice I send includes my late payment policy:

Anyone else care to share their own strategy for invoicing?

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Thanks!!

Very informative !

This is a great example of how to be organized when invoicing and I'm really going to adapt this to use some of the way it's set up for my own invoices. Right now I invoice based on what my boss expects which is all handwritten but I like this digitized and emailable way much better.
Maybe I'll try to get him switched over and see how that goes.
I was thinking if I can just make the working situation more tolerable and more evenly balanced toward my own preferences.

This is great, I am glad I found this post! These gives me a few tips on how to improve my invoicing.

Rose, I can't imagine writing out all of my invoices by hand! This way is actually quite 'old fashioned' - when you consider all of the great time tracking software out there, but I like the fact that this is easy and flexible. It's worked well for over two years, and 20+ clients

Virtua, I agree with the use of a PDF for the client (non-editable on the receiving end) but I can't imagine a time that I'd ever switch over to actual paper billing via the post - too much work! Although, if you're working with big companies as you said then it sounds like you don't have much choice if you want to get paid

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I use QuickBooks (duh, eh? see'ins how I do books for a living? ) to do my invoicing and tracking (all 2 clients ). I print the invoices to .pdf format and email them to my clients monthly on the 1st w/a net 15. I run an A/R report prior to invoicing to verify that there aren't any outstanding invoices.

I put my payment terms/penalties, etc. in the original consulting agreement and put NET 15 on the invoices. Obviously, no problems with payments yet!

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Lily Chambers, The Virtual Office Goddess, LLC
Author "How to Do Your Own Small Business Bookkeeping"

Quickbooks is on my list of absolutely-must-learn ASAP
My little XL sheet is getting awfully BIG! It works well enough for now, but....

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What a great thread..

My invoice is similar to Tess'..Mainly, because she gave me some great tips to add to my invoice. Thanks Tess. I've found tha the more thorough my invoice is, the less problems I will have in the future. It is spelled out. Completely. I agree with Tess.. Quickbooks is on my list of to do's!!

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Ummm... Is this where I plug that I do QuickBooks for a living

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Lily Chambers, The Virtual Office Goddess, LLC
Author "How to Do Your Own Small Business Bookkeeping"

Definately plug... Thats one of the reasons I love this forum so much.. We are all good at different things!! In the same way, with any new clients coming in, I would much prefer to send them over your way, knowing you do Quickbooks for a living

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Thanks!

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Lily Chambers, The Virtual Office Goddess, LLC
Author "How to Do Your Own Small Business Bookkeeping"

Lily, just curious - in your opinion how would a paid program like QuickBooks Pro compare with Microsoft Accounting Express? I follow the 'you get what you pay for' rule except in some cases when it comes to software - with so many free options out there I'm just curious if there's anything comparable to QB Pro? (I know you use QB Pro - so am assuming it must be the best possible option?)

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In my 10+ years of accounting experience I have used a lot of different accounting programs and personally I have not found one that I like better than QuickBooks. It is user-friendly, customizable and now they have industry specific software as well.

I downloaded the free MS Accounting program just to play with it and see how I like it (I try to keep an open mind). It took up so much space on my computer my computer was running at least 2x as slow, because it downloads the full and extended versions even though you can't use them.

I tried playing with it but every time I tried to do something it told me that that feature was only available with the full version. I removed it after the first day.

Oh, to answer the original topic question. My billing is very simple. I use myhours.com to track my time. I can set up the clients, projects and their rate, it even has a place to add extra costs, like copies, it prints out the timesheets with the costs already figured.

I enter the invoices into QuickBooks based on the myhours timesheets. I email most of my invoices directly from QB. I currently bill my clients either weekly or monthly, whatever their preference is.

I don't enter too much detail into my QuickBooks invoices, mainly because it takes too much time to re-enter everything. I do have the detail on my myhours timesheets and if they request the detail then I will send it to them.

Overall it's a very simple process, QB track my A/R and figures finance charges automatically.

*Footnote to the above post: QuickBooks does have a free version now, called QuickBooks Basic. I have not used it. You can check it out at www.intuit.com

Thanks for the info Rebecka, I'm going to go ahead and invest in the QB Pro version - as I'll be using it for tax purposes may as well have the best one Good to know about the Microsoft program, I've heard so many great things about QB, but was wondering if anyone had tried Bill Gates' attempt at it

As to my invoicing - it may look complicated but it's quite easy actually - one invoice per client file on my hard drive and one XL sheet for my own invoice tracking...just in the detailing of it it ends up appearing quite confounded. I am interested in myhours though, and will likely give it a test drive just for the sake of curiosity.

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