Creating and sending a professional invoice is one of the most important things you can do as a freelance consultant or small business owner. An invoice is the only way for your customer to understand how much they need to pay you for your services. Because of this, your invoices must be professional and get read again by your customers. A boring, unreadable invoice can lead to distrust and hurt your business in the long run. Fortunately, creating an online invoice doesn’t have to be scary or difficult. With these tips and tricks, you can confidently create online professional invoices that get paid every time. The following tutorial will show you everything you need to know about creating professional invoices that get paid every time.
Define What An Invoice Means To Your Business
This is your business - you have a clear idea of how you want to run it, the things you want to achieve, and how best you want to achieve them. With the power of decision-making, you should be able to define what an invoice means to your business. As we mentioned earlier, the invoice is one of the most powerful business tools. Sadly, not many people know how to put this powerful tool to good use, making them miss out on many perks that come with using an invoice to receive payments from your customers/clients.
Does your business need you to send invoices to customers/clients? Defining what an invoice means to your business is the first step in adding that professional outlook to your business.
Make It Easy For Clients To Pay You
Many people don’t understand that having a good and trusted online invoice system establishes a strong connection and trust with their clients/customers. While you are the one offering the products/services, you need to understand that paying for anything is never easy, so you have to make it as easy as possible for your clients. An invoice makes it very easy for your clients to pay you as it includes the necessary information about what they’re paying for, such as the fees (including taxes) and whatever conditions you’re working with. Create a unique invoice number for all your invoices, and always remember to include your email address so your client can send payment receipts as soon as they make payments. Thankfully, there are many free invoice templates to choose from; you only need to search correctly. Your invoice information must include the invoice date, contact information, penalty for late payments, company logo, line items, and many more.
Include Only The Important Information
As much as sending an invoice to your clients shows how professional your business is and makes it easy for them to make payments, you also don’t want to bore them out by including unnecessary information they probably don’t need to see. When you send an online invoice out to a client for the first time, they will take their time to go through it, and that’s a good opportunity to leave a good first impression. However, you may not be doing this if you include things that are not important. If your invoice is filled with errors and unclear terms, you’ll only be shooting yourself in the leg because you’ll only leave them unimpressed. Below are some of the important things you need to include in your invoice;
- Name of the document (this mostly appears as ‘invoice’, which is the standard representation).
- A unique invoice ID
- Your company’s name and business logo
- Your company’s address
- Recipient’s name/company’s name
- Recipient’s address/company’s address
- Date of invoice
- Date of supply
- The due date for payment
- Description of products/services (including the name(s), price(s), and quantity(es) of products.
- Total payable amount
- Purchase order number
- Payment terms
- Payment methods
- Customer information
Don’t Shy Away From Color and Design
Sending an invoice to a client is to show how professional your business is and leave a lasting positive impression. If you send an invoice with mismatched colors and an unprofessional design, you may get bad feedback (that’s if the client is good enough to want to work with you again). Never shy away from good color and design. However, you need to ensure everything represents your brand’s core values, including your logo, colors, and creativity. Whatever color you opt for, make sure it matches your brand colors.
Show Your Contract Terms Upfront
The good thing about sending an invoice to get paid is that you’re in charge of the terms as long as they’re favorable for your clients. A good practice is never to make the mistake of leaving out your contract terms whenever you send an online invoice out to a client. You want to ensure that your interests are protected at all times, and one of the best ways to ensure that is by including your contract terms at the bottom of your invoice. As a matter of fact, if there’s one thing you should leave out of an invoice, it should never be your contract terms. However, make this as short and concise as possible. It should be short enough to pass your message across effectively. A blank invoice template may guide you better on this. Just know what your business needs are and a good way to include your contract terms in your invoice.
Deliverable Tracking Is Key (Track the Invoices You’ve Sent and the Payment Status)
One of the many benefits of invoicing is that you can control your payments (incoming and outgoing). If you want to be in a healthy financial state, you should be able to track your invoices and the payment status so you can know which ones are due and the ones that require follow-up. You should always get what you deserve for the hard work, don't you?
Read more on How To Ask For Payment Of An Invoice Politely - Guide and Email Templates
Sum Up Your Reporting with a Business Profitability Analysis
At the end of the day, invoicing aims to ensure you can track the financial part of your business by keeping tabs on the outgoings, incomings, and pending ones. A good invoicing system features a business profitability analysis that shows a full report of your transactions (invoices). This brings us to our last point - choosing a good system to trust with your business. Recurring invoices are perfect for long-term contracts, so you should always consider that too.
Using IntaSend To Collect Payments
Regarded as the most trusted payment provider in East Africa, especially Kenya, IntaSend’s reputation continues to grow by the day. The company’s mission is to build responsive, secure, fast payment software that allows payments across Africa. As a business owner, especially if you want to thrive online, you must have a good payment provider offering affordable payment services. If you’ve been searching for a reputable payment provider to trust, IntaSend should be your go-to company. IntaSend offers a free invoice generator that makes the whole invoicing process much easier.
What sets IntaSend apart from every other payment provider you can come across in Africa is that the company truly wants your business to thrive as much as possible. With a good understanding of the market and its struggles, IntaSend has created some amazing features that allow you to enjoy payment services in the best way possible. Some of these features include;
Accept card payments
Whether you’re a freelancer or a business owner with local and international clients/customers, accepting payments for your products/services must have, at some point, posed a major threat to your business. Things like this are never easy in Africa as it is very hard to find a good and authentic system that handles the acceptance of payments. IntaSend has stepped in to create a lasting solution to this problem by ensuring you can instantly send an invoice to your clients/customers from your dashboard and get paid almost immediately. IntaSend supports all major cards, including MasterCard and Visa.
Flexible payment methods
Card payment is not the only way you can receive payments on IntaSend. If you are dealing with local customers, you can request payments via mobile, including M-Pesa. International customers, especially the ones in the United States, can pay from any bank in the country to Kenya without any struggle. There’s also an option to be paid with Bitcoin. At the end of the day, with all these options, you’re only left with choosing the one that works best for you. Remember, it’s better to have the options and not need them than to need them and not have them.
Fast settlements
Enjoy a fast settlement period on IntaSend. With other payment providers, you may have to wait for up to 7 days before you can access your funds. You don’t have to go through the same as IntaSend offers one of the fastest, if not the fastest, settlement periods in the business. It only takes 2-3 days before you can access your money on IntaSend. With this very short wait period, it’s always easy to make plans for your money and channel it to the right source.
Affordable fees
IntaSend also offers competitive fees on all transactions. This is great for business as you don’t have to spend all your profits on payment services. IntaSend has made these fees affordable because the company understands how difficult it is to get a good payment provider with fair fees. Some providers can even charge as much as 8% per transaction, and at the end of the day, you’ll realize you’ve been working for them all along.
IntaSend charges as low as 1% on mobile transactions with benefits that include payment notifications, fraud management, transaction reports, zero maintenance fee, M-Pesa STK push, and instant payout.
IntaSend also charges as low as 1.5% on disbursements with benefits that you might have to pay for if you opt for another payment provider. These benefits include unlimited beneficiaries/phone numbers, 24/7 customer support, fraud, errors, and duplicate checks; API access, transaction reports, flexible liquidity plan, and many more.
On cards, IntaSend charges 3.5% per transaction on local cards and 4.5% on international cards.
Instant payout to bank and M-Pesa
As soon as you get through the 2-3 days waiting period, you now have access to your funds, which you can withdraw and be credited instantly. Withdrawal to bank and M-Pesa accounts are subjected to verification and approval, after which you’ll receive your money in your account immediately.
No-code options: Payment links and invoicing
Enjoy seamless payment with IntaSend’s no-code options. If you want to receive payments from your clients, you only need to go to your dashboard, create an invoice, choose a preferred payment method, generate a payment link, and send it to your clients via email or WhatsApp. Every payment request/invoice generated on IntaSend can be found on your dashboard, so you can always be confident of keeping track of your payment history.
There’s no better way to enjoy receiving payments than this. This way, you’re also making things easier for your clients/customers. You can choose between the several payment methods available on IntaSend to receive your payments.
Easy-to-use API
Whether you’re a developer or a business owner, you don’t have to struggle to receive payments on your e-commerce sites. IntaSend offers an easy-to-use API for WooCommerce and Shopify. Payment integration for both e-commerce tools is very easy. All you need to get started is to create an account with IntaSend, which is totally free.
Read more on IntaSend WooCommerce integration here.
Read more on IntaSend Shopify integration here.
Better customer support
Wherever you are, at any time of the day, you can always reach out to the IntaSend customer support team with the assurance of getting a response. The IntaSend customer support team works tirelessly to ensure users enjoy problem-free sessions whenever they’re using any of IntaSend’s services. The easiest way to reach the support team is by using the chat option on the website. However, you may not get a quick response if you’re reaching out outside business hours. Even with that, you can still use any of the two other options: email and phone.
Proven technology
IntaSend adopts proven technology to please its customers, which is evident by the many futuristic features available on the platform. This is why it is trusted by over 10,000 users who perform regular transactions because they’re sure of secure incoming or outgoing payments. IntaSend ensures that every transaction performed through the platform is PCI and DSS-compliant.
Conclusion
Invoicing has become a big part of every business, especially in this digital age. Customers want to know that they are getting what they paid for, and businesses want to ensure they keep their customers happy. The best way to do this is to use invoices. They serve various purposes, such as keeping track of payments and providing evidence of a sale or service. They also help improve a company's reputation by generating trust among customers.
The complexity of keeping track of invoices and understanding how to use them best to optimize your cash flow has become a major challenge for many small businesses. The emergence of modern payment platforms, such as IntaSend, has been more than a blessing by bringing a lasting solution to the problem that has plagued small businesses for years.
Don't forget that there's a lot you can do with your IntaSend account, so ensure you maximize all the free features as much as you can.
