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Getting invoices done quickly not only helps bring the cash in from your customers faster, but improves productivity and can reduce overhead. While 15 minutes a day doesn’t seem like much, if you work 48 weeks a year (52 minus 2 weeks’ vacation and 10 holidays), 15 minutes a day is 60 hours a year. Just think what you or an employee can do with that extra time. Additional billable work, another sales call, or clocking out sooner. Financially, it’s $600/year for an employee making $10/hour, $1500 at $25/hour, $6000 for someone at $100/hour!
These tips below can save you more than 15 minutes (and have for many clients and myself), depending on the complexity and volume of invoicing.
- Invoice off of Estimate or Sales Order – Rather than create an invoice from scratch, if an Estimate or Sales Order exists, click on Create Invoice, select some or all of the Items on the invoice – definitely much faster.
- Use Item Groups – This is a fast way to pull multiple items onto an invoice (or estimate or sales order). While you might select only 1 item (group), you might find your invoice now has 20 Items. Examples – items in a display, components of an outdoor fountain, labor and materials for a shed…
- Duplicate – If you need to create an invoice similar to another one you’ve done, you can duplicate the invoice, change the customer and any other pertinent information. (You can also use this feature with estimates – very helpful for those who need to price 2 ways for whatever reason.)
- Memorize Invoice – Need to do this invoice (or type of invoice) frequently? Then memorize the entire invoice. Can be helpful for landscapers and other service providers who will invoice the same amount monthly. I also had a client use this feature because the detail in the item descriptions was lengthy, specific for the client but the same description every month. Definitely saved her more than 15 minutes!
- Batch Invoice – This is a very fast way to create invoices for multiple customers who are being invoiced for the same product or service and the same rate. An example would be homeowners’ monthly association fee.
- Invoice from Time & Materials – If you invoice for time and materials or expenses and have the information already in QuickBooks, you can pull that into your invoice. You get to choose how it appears.
- Batch Time & Expenses – Available in Premier or higher – different than Batch in #5, this lets you create time and material invoices quickly. Your billable time and expenses summary shows in a chart (great way to see it all in one place) and you can quickly invoice multiple customers who may all have very different times and expenses.
- Group of Memorized Invoices – For those of you who send out monthly invoices and a client is billed the same amount each month, but a different amount than another client, this is a powerful tool. A landscaper could quickly invoice all their lawn maintenance clients, or a bookkeeper with flat fee billing or a contractor providing project management… You have to first create an invoice, memorize it and then save it in a group (you can have multiple groups). When it’s time to invoice, simply go to your memorized transaction page and double-click on the group, enter the date and all the invoices in that group will be created!
You may find you use a combination of these options, but you will definitely save lots of time and get your invoices out much faster.
So what will YOU do with the time that you save?
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