In this post I’m going to show you how you can fill out an invoice pdf for freelance work!
Hey guys, my name is Scott and I make posts like this one on freelancing tips, as well as tutorials on Premiere Pro, and Photoshop. So please do consider hitting the follow button at the top right of this page so you don’t miss any of those! Ok let’s get into how we can fill out an invoice pdf.
So the invoicing tip I’m going to show you today I think is pretty cool, because it doesn’t require downloading any fancy software or anything like that, and it’s completely FREE. I’m going to walk you through exactly how I fill out my invoices for my freelance work.
First thing I’m going to do is open my browser, and type in https://invoice-generator.com. This is a fantastic site, I use this for all of my invoices and it’s super easy to use and actually has a lot of cool features built into it which I’ll cover in a moment. And NO I’m not sponsored by this site, this is not a paid promotion by any means, I literally found this website one day and started using them and I’m telling you guys about it because I love it!
So I’m going to start at the top of the invoice and work my way down, and once I’m finished filling this page out, we can download it straight from the website as a pdf. The top portions are pretty self explanatory. For example, if you have a logo image for your business or freelance work you can add that image here.
The next section is where you put your contact information. So I’ll put my name, and then I’ll put my address (not my real one of course, but you get the idea). I usually put a space, and then I’ll type in my email address and my phone number information.
After that there’s the bill to section. This is where you put the client’s information, specifically their billing address. Be sure to double check this, as some client’s have multiple billing addresses for their businesses and they may want you to use a particular one on your invoice.
Now let’s go over to the top right of the pdf, you can set the invoice number to whatever you want. This is really for YOUR records, not the client’s. I typically will keep track of how many invoices I send to a particular client, that way it’s easier for me to look up an invoice that I sent months ago if I need to for any reason.
Payment terms, I usually keep this section blank. But let’s say you have an agreement with a client, that they’ll pay you at the end of the month or they’ll pay you all in cash or something like that. You can write EOM for end of month, or COD for cash on delivery. But again, I usually keep this blank, because you’ll see how the next section kind of covers this…
The next part of the invoice is the due date, and here’s a Pro Tip: I always write Due Upon Receipt in this section. That way when the client receives this invoice, you’re letting them know that you want to be paid right away. Now this may not work in every scenario, because as I mentioned, sometimes you might have an agreement with a client to be paid at a specific time. But in my experience, usually that’s not the case, and you can bill a client immediately when you send the invoice.
Ok so lets move down to the middle section. For the items, I usually put the general title of the project that I worked on, and maybe a brief word or two about what my role was, like Baseball history video – Video edit
I’m going to skip over quantity really quick, but I’m going to come back to it. For the rate, this is NOT the place to put your hourly rate. You want to put the total amount that the project cost here. So if my hourly rate is $50 per hour, and I worked on this project for eight hours, I would then put $400 here. If you’re not paid hourly, but by the project, then simply put how much the project costs in this section.
And then coming back to quantity, in most cases I usually only work on one project at a time. But let’s say you did a weekly project where you were editing videos or creating something under the same larger project. You could put 4 here, one for each project week. Once you update the number of projects, the invoice will automatically update the total amount below. You can also add in more projects in another line, and add I think as many as you need.
For tax, I usually keep this blank because I work taxes into the final cost as it is (which is agreed upon by the client), that way there’s no real sticker shock to a client when they see the invoice for the first time. But if you want to put in a discount, or add shipping costs you can do that as well.
Amount paid, I usually keep this at $0 UNLESS a client as already paid a portion of the project upfront. In that case I would put the amount the client had paid in this section, which would then be subtracted from the grand total.
Next we have the notes section, this is where I put what my role was. In most cases, I’m usually a video editor. And then I put what my rate is, so let’s say $50 per hour. Or you could put what the paid per project terms are here instead.
I also use this area to get super detailed on what exactly I did on the project. In my case as a video editor, I’ll write how many videos were created, what they were called, how long each section took me to edit, how many versions or variations of the videos were created. Try to use this space to get very, very detailed if you can. I’m not going to fill out this entire thing right now, because that would make this video super long, but I think you get the idea of what I mean.
In my experience, client’s love to see what exactly you did and they really appreciate all the information you can give them. Some may not care at all, and never even bother to read it, but my feeling is, it’s always better to overshare information then to leave a client in the dark about something. Because you never want a client to come back to you after sending an invoice asking what exactly did you do, and how did you come to these numbers?
And that brings me to my next point, which is invoices can take a long time to craft. They can be very time consuming, especially if you worked on a large project. So a couple tips would be to first, make you sure you allow an extra hour or two for invoicing in your billing. You don’t want to be doing this stuff on your free time when you could be doing other things. Second, make sure you track all of your hours and time very carefully BEFORE you sit down to write your invoice. This will save you a lot of time and headaches trying to remember exactly what you did and when.
The last section is the terms part, and I usually leave this blank as well. But like it says on the invoice you can use this area, for filling out a payment schedule or late fees.
So now that we’ve filled out this invoice, let’s go up and I’m going to hit download invoice. The site will automatically create a pdf that I can open up and send out to a client if it’s ready to go. Or you can send it through the website by selecting the send invoice option and it will email the client a pdf of the invoice.
One last feature I want to show you guys, which I think is really cool, if you go to my invoices it will take you to a page where it stores all of your past invoices. The browser will remember previous invoices you created, and you can go back and edit them if necessary. Or maybe the browser crashes before you got to finish it, you can go back and pick up from where you left off. I think that’s a pretty cool feature and for a free service it’s really awesome.
So that’s how you can fill out an invoice pdf, what other kind of issues are you guys having with invoicing? Let me know in the comments below, and I’ll see if I can make a post covering that! If you’ve enjoyed this post, don’t forget to like and share it with anyone else who might also enjoy it. For more information on Freelancing tips, Premiere Pro, and Photoshop head on over to my YouTube channel where I have tons more tutorials. Also, check out my other tutorial posts which I’ve posted at the top of this page.
Scott Edward Fowler 