An appropriately planned open invoice speaks volumes about the quality and professionalism of an individual’s business. To leave a lasting impression one should spend some time developing an invoice template that conveys the values of the business enterprise.
To be credible in the eyes of the customers and existing clientele it is important that all the paperwork for an Open Invoice that they receive from an individual appears professional and well planned. Although the invoice is probably the last thing they receive at the completion of a piece of work, it still needs to look at the part and if done right, may promote further jobs from the client.
How does it work?
- An Open Invoice template is where one needs to start. This will enable an individual to quickly develop invoices that include the branding and company particulars, creating consistency across all clients and all the invoices.
- Elements that you should include in an invoice template would be the company logo, company address and other contact details, terms of payment, and payment details – bank account number, sort code, or if one gets paid by cheque “payable to” details. Even if one gets paid by cash, the customers may still ask for an open invoice for tax return purposes.
- The other and probably most important element of an open invoice is a space for the itemization of charges. An individual will need to itemize each element of the invoice, date each item, describe the service or goods and cost them. One will then need to create a total and if applicable calculate and add the VAT.
Most clients will want the VAT value separately calculated on the invoice – so leave space for that. If one prefers to use spreadsheet applications such as Microsoft Excel 2010 or the Open Office spreadsheet package then he/she is at an advantage at this stage of creating the invoice template. The benefit is there when you want the template to automatically add up the Open Invoice total. Microsoft Excel for example will allow you to automatically calculate the VAT value and will then calculate a total for an individual. Once these formulas have been entered into the template one will not have to worry about them again as all the calculations will happen automatically.
Why choose a PDF Format?
It is quite appropriate these days to email an open invoice to the customer – saving loads of precious time – rather than posting it in the traditional manner. Consideration must be done before creating a PDF of the invoice or before sending it, rather than sending the actual Microsoft Word or Excel document. A PDF cannot be edited and also does not require Excel or Word to open, making it the ideally suited file format for this reason.
Conclusion
Well, the OpenOffice version of Excel is in fact completely free! If an individual doesn’t like the idea of using a spreadsheet and would prefer to use a word-processing application such as Microsoft Word 2010 then he/she will be pleased to know that there are plenty of free open invoice templates that ship with the computer software. Word does in fact include some of the functionality of Excel in that it is able to do essential calculations too. It will, for example, be able to add up the itemized Open Invoice without too much trouble.