1 Timely

Just in the nick of time. That’s all I gotta say.

Thanks 8 )

posted at 09:51 am on August 10, 2004 by Ray

2 A Recommendation

Whenever I’ve sent out invoices, I’ve always added an Invoice ID (or Reference ID). If I have to phone a company about a specific invoice, or they need to phone me, it saves time if you can use an id number to denote the specific invoice. This especially helps when dealing with companies that owe for several invoices, or larger companies.

posted at 10:01 am on August 10, 2004 by ILoveJackDaniels

3 Early payment discounts are dangerous

I’ve run a software consulting firm for 12 years. I learned very early on — don’t bother offering discounts for fast payment. Your big customers will pay late and still demand the discount.

Maybe that’s no longer true, but I heard from a variety of sources that it was common practice to exploit those discounts.

Also, you’ll find that many companies don’t pay invoices until you ask them. I had one client who I referred to as paying “bitch plus three”. If I wanted to get paid, I just asked the accountant when to expect a check. I’d get it 3 days later. I could ask at 27 days into the invoice or at 3 months. The invoice wouldn’t get paid until I asked about it, then it would get moved to the top of the pile and be paid the next time they cut checks.

posted at 11:51 am on August 10, 2004 by Joe

4 Great Article - some tools that helped me

I’ve had an interesting (and positive) experience in this area upon my recent return to the Mac OS. I found [url=“www.iggsoftware.com/iwork”]iWork 2[/url], which is a great little time tracker. It integrates with iCal, which in turn integrates with [url=“www.basecamphq.com”]Basecamp[/url] via a project XML feed. So, I’ve got top-to-bottom task management and time-tracking – a system that simply didn’t exist a few years ago, certainly not on Windows for the price. It certainly has a ways to go, but it’s a great start.

A nice surprise were the invoicing templates for iWork – at first glance, they were quite ugly. Some cleaner fonts and a company logo, however, produced some really nice-looking invoices.

I had forgotten about adding a few things mentioned, however – glad I caught this article when I did. Thanks apartness!

posted at 11:51 am on August 10, 2004 by Allan White

5 Great stuff

Great article! I’m glad to know that my invoices have been pretty much on the mark, but now I know how I can make them even better. Thanks again!

posted at 12:03 pm on August 10, 2004 by Robert D.

6 A tad American-centric

First, let me chime in with the others who said that this is timely and relevant. Good work.

However, I’m a little baffled at some of the things you list, such as the “Employer Identification Number” and “W-2”. Can you explain these more clearly so that we can determine what our national equivalents are?

PS those looking for an alternative to iWork may well want to check out AppleSource’s TimeNet (http://www.applesource.biz/software/timenet/)

posted at 12:22 pm on August 10, 2004 by Robert Hahn

7 Additional tips

Thanks for a great article. Nuts and bolts stuff like this merits almost as much attention as high-design technique. (It, too, is all about the usability.)

As long as we’re sharing, here are a couple of things I do that make freelancing a little easier:

To achieve that wholesome branding goodness, I design the invoice in a page-layout program (I use InDesign), trying to be careful not to “overdesign.” Then for the guts I place an Excel spreadsheet, so that Excel does all the number-crunching automatically as I enter blocks of time on the job.

Also, I’ve adopted a convention of making the invoice number correlate semantically to the date the work was begun (e.g., TM-040711-XYZ, where TM are my initials and XYZ is an acronym for the client). Then as you suggest, date the invoice the day it is sent.

This method provides two advantages:
1. It indicates the overall duration of the billing cycle (the difference between the invoice number and the invoice date), and
2. The invoices order themselves both chronologically and by name in your folder.

Obviously not as sophisticated as say, iWork or Basecamp, but good enough for us small fry.

posted at 02:05 pm on August 10, 2004 by Trace Meek

8 Invoices: hand-crafted, or macro-brew?

Meek, I hear you on the value of the nicely formatted, InDesign-created invoices. That was my process exactly – until I started using iWork. Any good invoicing tool will work, but boy I sure got tired of sifting through all my PDF invoices manually, when now I can search my database. The appearance of the tweaked template is pretty nice IMHO.

iWork also does automatically increment the invoice and job numbers, I think you can combine it with a text string in the template.

I hear that Studiometry (www.oranged.net) is also good; I checked several out before selecting iWork.

I also wanted to clarify: Basecamp doesn’t do invoicing (yet – tell it to Jason; support@basecamphq.com), it’s just for project managment. But I can pull down a task list: BC >> iCal >> iWork.

Forgive me if I’m O/T with software tools; but Basecamp and iWork have radically transformed the way I work.

posted at 04:00 pm on August 10, 2004 by Allan White

9 United Stated of Earth?

- Employer Identification Number (EIN) – Social Security Number – putting together W-2s

what the?

posted at 04:13 pm on August 10, 2004 by bill

10 never use your SSN

Never ever expose your Social Security Number on an invoice (or anywhere else for that matter). Use an EIN instead, you can [url=“http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=98350,00.html”]get one[/url] from the IRS for free and it takes about 15 minutes.

posted at 04:40 pm on August 10, 2004 by nathan