In the last lesson, we learned about the different types of reports available in QuickBooks self employed, and how we can use these reports to our benefit. In this lesson, we're going to go over how to invoice your clients using QuickBooks self employed. So the first thing you want to do is to click click on the invoices tab. Once you get to the invoices tab, you then want to click on Create invoice. Now in addition to invoicing your clients using QuickBooks self employed, you would also like to like your clients to pay you directly on that invoice. In other words, QuickBooks self employed has a feature where when you invoice a client if you want the client to pay you using the invoice there is a tab that the client can click on and make the payment directly from the invoice but it order for you to do that you have to set up payments.

So in order to set up payments, you want to click on the setup payments tab. Once you get to this screen, then you want to follow all the directions that is required in order for you to set up your payments. Now once your payments have been set up in QuickBooks self employed, and you will now be able to accept payments from clients, you'll you'll notice you're going to get paid a lot faster. Because now a client can just make this look at the invoice you send them, press on the necessarily tab or link and make the payments immediately. Clients can not only pay you by credit card, they can also pay you using a bank transfer rate from the invoice and payments typically take up to about oh I don't know a couple of days, maybe two to three days to get paid. So it's a really good idea for you to set this up so you can get paid a lot faster.

You know, clients no longer have their skis. Oh, I didn't see the building. The mail what forgot no because you can actually send them the payments and they can pay you arrive at it you can send them the invoice and they can pay you right then and there. So you've made your way to the invoice screen and then you're going to click on Create invoice. Once you once you click on Create invoice, you can look to the right of the screen and you can see all the information that's going to show up on the actual invoice. You can upload your logo here, you're going to have your name and email address the country that you're in.

And you can also include your street address if you choose to your city state zip and your phone number. Once you've done that, then he wants to say that keep in mind anything that you put on the screen is going to show up on the actual invoice. Okay, so you're gonna click click on Save. And now let's create the invoice so we're going to be sending an invoice to David Smith email address is We'll use my email address definitely Anderson at Anderson accounting three.com client information we're going to put the address so 123 nowhere Street and that came to be in Atlanta, state of Georgia, zip code 30074 data, the invoice whatever date the day is that you are preparing the invoice and then the due date so the due date is anything that you choose. So if you create the invoice on say October 22 and you want to make this invoice due immediately then you can also include the due date as being October 22 or you can make it make the invoice date.

Further out depending on depending upon whatever your terms of agreement is. Once we have created an invoice for a particular client and we've included the clients information including the invoice date and the due date, Now we're going to add the work that we actually did. So we click on the tab add work. And so the first thing is, you have to describe what we did. So I'm just going to say financial statement preparation, men. Thank crap polarization, and we're going to use a flat rate for this we have an option to use flat rates by the hour or per item.

In this case, we're going to use flat rate so $500 add to invoice. The second one, we're going to add more work and this is going to be a consultation. So let's say my clients or I had a consultation with a client. So consultation if I can spell I would help calm Song patien and with the consultation, we're going to use the hourly rate so by the hour My rate is $150 an hour, so it's going to be for three hours at $150 an hour. So that's that's going to be, we're going to add to invoice and that's $450. And then the final item is going to be let's say I sold a client some extra Excel spreadsheets or Excel templates.

So we'll say Excel template and the Excel template. We are going to use item and each template was $25. So I sold them for templates. That's for templates at $25. We added that to the invoice that gives $100 for the total invoice, excuse me, the total invoice is 1050. So now we're done with that.

Now you can you can leave a message you can even keep the generic message which says thank you for your business or you can include a personal message in this box. Then you are going to click on Send invoice. Or if you don't want to send the invoice right away, you can also just save it as a draft, we can preview it before sending it. So let's preview the invoice before we send it. So this is what the invoice is going to look like. When the client gets it, it's going to look like it's going to have a billing person that's gonna be billed to David Smith is going to be from you, whoever you are, in this case, it's Jennifer Smith, and you're going to have the invoice items broken down financial statement, preparation, consultation, and excel templates for that invoice is going to let the client know exactly how they're being billed so they can tell what the financial statement preparation is just one single amount.

So it's a flat amount, the consultation they can see that three hours they would charge $250 an hour, that's 450. And for the Excel Excel templates, they can see they purchase for units at $25. And that's $100 so they can see that Actual breakdown in case they have any questions about the invoice, they can email you and ask such questions. Now it's you're ready to go you can press on or rather click Send invoice. So once you send the invoice the client now has the invoice in their inbox. So once that's done, you can perform other actions so you can click on the down arrow and it's going to tell you two different things that you can do.

So you can actually view the invoice so let's click on view. So once again, we're back to that view screen. So this is after you've sent it you can actually view the invoice and see exactly what you sent. You can also rotate it why I'm not quite sure why you want you'd want to look at this invoice sideways or why you want to look at it upside down. I really don't know. But feature is there just in case people who know how to read upside down.

Perfect feature to you. Now we can x out of here and then see what else I'm having headaches. So it for example, You sent information that's incorrect. Or if the customer contacted you and said, Okay, this doesn't look right, can you research it and you make the determination that something needs to be changed, you can actually go in and edit into Edit and you can edit the invoice. Once you've edited the invoice, you can go ahead and resend it to the client. Okay.

And again, another thing you can do is you can duplicate the invoice if you so choose, you can export it as a PDF. So if the client is sitting right there in your office, and they don't want you to email the invoice to them, or they just prefer that you don't email it to them before that you'd either upload it to a portal or get it to them in another way, you can export the invoice as a PDF. Let's see how that looks. And once it's exported, this is how it's going to look. There it is, is exploited invoice nothing you can do is you can you can print it yourself or if you need to if the client says oh I didn't get the invoice even though you know they may not be telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth they just don't want to pay you at this time, but he just go ahead and resend it from here.

And also if you realize that you have created an invoice That is incorrect, or you want to get rid of it for whatever reason, you can delete the invoice using this particular tab. Now once the invoice has been emailed to your client, let's see what the invoice looks like. So here it is, it came in Jennifer Smith, and it says you have received a new invoice and this is the person that sent you the invoice so your name will show up here. Whatever the name of your business is what you use, your name is going to show up here and then the client will see it see it this way and it says you've received a new invoice. You can click on the invoice and this is what they see. They're going to see Jennifer Smith sent you an invoice, click the button below or click the button to view the invoice.

Thanks Now if you have set yourself up to accept payments in QuickBooks self employed, there's also also going to be a tab around here that's going to say, pay now, let's click the invoice and see what it what it looks like. And here is the invoice. Also within here. There will also be a tab that says pay now so the clients can actually go in and make the payment. So the client can do one of three things, they can actually click on the button that says pay the invoice and only they can only do that if you have set up payments, they can print the invoice and they can also save the invoice as a PDF. The client sees exactly how much the total is due date.

They also see who it came from. And they see the items broken down by service. They see The financial statement preparation consultation and the Excel templates. And the message is down here. So whatever message you you input other than the generic message, which is thanks for your business, if you decide to type in something else it's going to show down here. And that is how the invoice looks, of course your email address going to be here.

And it was also tells the clients to contact Jennifer Smith. If you are not sure how to pay this invoice Well, they should be sure because hopefully you'll go ahead and sign up for the payments. So that way you can get paid immediately and there is no question about how sure they are or not, they can just see a nice little cute button somewhere on the invoice that says pay now and they can click it and pay you this lesson we discussed how to use the invoice feature, and hopefully you are clear on how to use this feature. And now that you know that QuickBooks self employed has an invoice feature, you're going to use it to your advantage by and by using it to your advantage. That means that your clients are going to pay you a whole lot sooner.