As a freelance designer one has to do everything on their own. Its all do it yourself. This includes acquiring new customers, delivering projects on time, generating invoice, sending payment reminders… and many more activities. Its like one man company. Doing such routine tasks manually can take up lot of time and efforts. These tasks can be automatized with the help of tools, which will significantly save your time and increase efficiency.
With this being said, today in this article we will discuss, why freelance designers should use invoicing tools.
1. Automation
Automating some of your tasks is definitely a time saver, especially when it comes to invoicing because it allows you to eliminate manually sending invoices and then follow up reminders. Moreover, if services includes recurring invoices then things get really messy. Because if you delay sending invoices or forget, it can significantly affect your cash flow or some time you may even lose money.
Many invoicing tools provides great features such as auto-invoicing, Payment tracking and charging late fees. Online invoicing like Shimbi Invoice even provides direct client payments. These invoicing tools really empowers you by automation.
2. Saving Time
One of the most important aspect of online Invoicing is to eliminate the significant amount of the manual labour you may have to spend putting invoices together. In early days of Intranet, there were barely any online invoicing application available. Back then freelancers would have been manually creating an invoice in Microsoft Word or Excel. It was really big pain. It was prone to a lot of tragic mistakes that are sometimes impossible to correct. Today, there are several Online Invoicing application available; why not take advantage of them?
Being able to save time is certainly a “fortune” in itself.
3. Multi Currency Support
If you have International clients then it makes more sense to invoice them in their local currency. This is exactly what many of the great invoicing web application such as Shimbi Invoice provides. Automatized Currency selection/conversion. So you have full freedom to invoice your customer whether he is from US, Europe, Japan, or anywhere else.
4. Payment Options
We all know as a freelance the difficulties of ensuring your client pay you on time. Online Invoice Applications really help you in different ways such as generating automated invoice, sending reminders and following up on dues.
Other than these tasks, most important is that they let you implement direct payment methods. This is the feature where the client can view the invoice and pay directly using several different types of online and offline payment methods.
If your client has a hard time paying the invoice, how can you expect, they will make the payment on time when they’re suppose to? Online invoicing applications solve this problem not only by helping you to eliminate the payment method discussion, but also they are not left with any excuses for not making the payment of the correct amount due.
SEE ALSO: Practical Tips To Help You Get Paid On Time
5. Data Security
With the Online Invoicing System, your business data is backed up on a daily basis and stored on a secure server. You also have tools readily available to export invoices and any data you require for offline storage and viewing. Managing your business billing online is the safe option compared to desktop applications where your business could suffer serious loss of data following hardware or software failure.
6. Access anytime, anywhere.
Last but not least for few freelancers who like to work as Nomad. You can easily access your online invoicing application from any computers from anywhere, at any time. Unlike desktop, invoicing software applications, the Online Invoicing System gives you the ability and freedom to manage your business billing requirements from anywhere – at any time that suits you! All you need is internet access, the system is designed to use on any device (desktop, laptop, tablet, Smartphone…), and in any operating systems (Windows, Mac, Linux etc).
Quick Note: Shimbi Invoice is online invoicing application, which provides all the features mentioned above. You can start your test with the FREE Plan. Shimbi Invoice free plan comes with all the features that are available in the paid plans. When you are on a free plan, you will be able to create up to 5 customers and send unlimited estimates, invoices and receipts. Signup today and pay us only if you like it.
Conclusion
What’s better than enjoying your Weekend while invoices are being sent out and paid?
Have any other reasons why online invoicing Application should be used, let us know below!