As long as you provide goods or services to clients, you would require an invoice. Therefore, to have a professional-looking invoice and simplify your invoicing process, you would want to customize your invoice template.
Having a custom invoice template is of great advantage to your business as it affords you the flexibility to input your company’s values within your invoices. A well-thought-out personalized invoice template ensures you get paid on time and simplifies the entire invoicing process by allowing you to present relevant information to your clients and appeal to their sentiments.
There are several tips you can use to develop a custom-built invoice template for any business. The top-5 tips are presented and discussed below.
- Represent Your Company Brand
- Make Everything Simple and Easy
- Itemized Goods and Services
- Personalize Each Invoice
- Specify All Terms
- Printing and Spacing
- Highlight Important Details
- Payment Terms Placement
- How Do You Make an Invoice Attractive?
- What Should My First Invoice Number Be?
- Can I Design My Own Invoice?
Represent Your Company Brand
It is important that you adequately represent your company’s brand on all your documents, especially your tailor-made invoice template. Ensure that your invoice template resonates with the layout, theme colors, font type, and logo of your company. This approach presents a professional outlook of your company to your clients.
In line with this, you would want to write your company’s name, addresses, and contact information on your custom-designed invoice template. Your company name should be written boldly and conspicuously as you wouldn’t want your clients guessing.
Make Everything Simple and Easy
Specially-made invoice templates are supposed to make every aspect of invoicing simple and easy. As such, you would want to provide your clients with all information that would directly or indirectly simplify the payment process.
Although it is important to include your company’s brand information conspicuously, you wouldn’t want to compromise readability. Therefore, your custom invoice template should be easy to read. It would help if you used plain, clear, and large fonts while creating the document. In doing so, you may want to maintain a white background as it makes reading stress-free.
It is also crucial that you have the option of including your client’s information on the invoice. Your clients may not want to pay an invoice that doesn’t contain their company’s name. Additionally, make sure you include your preferred payment method. You would also want to indicate any payment plan or advance payment on the custom-built invoice. An editable section should be made on the template that allows for all these actions.
Itemized Goods and Services
A good and professional written custom invoice template should allow for the itemization of goods and services your company sells to clients. You would not want to send an invoice to your clients, which lacks clarity and structure. An itemized custom invoice template leads to an invoice, which serves as a good source of useful information for clients.
A table within your custom invoice template allows you to itemize every item or service delivered. It also allows you to provide a concise description, cost, quantity, and other relevant information concerning items purchased. Additionally, it allows for the calculation and inclusion of subtotals, taxes, discounts, other charges, and the total amount due.
Personalize Each Invoice
In most cases, your company may have tens or hundreds of clients you deal with daily. Your relationship with each client is important to you. Therefore, you should ensure that your clients recognize how important they are to your business. As such, you should develop a custom invoice template that lets you express your gratitude to your clients for their continuous patronage.
Make sure to customize your invoice template with an editable personal message box, which allows you to edit messages you may include within invoices. Also, you should ensure you use polite and professional language so that you don’t convey the wrong meaning to your clients. A simple “Thank You” or “Season Greetings” can solidify your relationship with your clients.
Specify All Terms
A custom invoice template without multiple date sections would produce invalid invoices. Therefore, you should develop a custom invoice template that allows for the inclusion of important dates. Providing fields for these dates is in line with the general terms of purchase that exist between your company and your clients.
It would be best if you made a provision for the inclusion of the violation section on your custom invoice template. Depending on the type of client you are writing an invoice for at any given period, you may edit the template to reflect existing penalties for the delay of payment.
Printing and Spacing
It would help if you made it easy for customers to print your invoice. Most businesses customize their invoices to have standard margins of an 8.5 x 11″ page. That makes them easy to scan through, even for small screens.
Moreover, a customer can print them on small paper sizes, which saves money for your clients that need to print them. However, you can still design your invoices to fit the A4 paper size. That can create enough space for descriptions, which is often necessary for certain products.
Highlight Important Details
An invoice must have all details needed to record a transaction and make the invoiced amount. However, certain details must stand out so that customers do not end up missing crucial details of the invoice.
Moreover, when they open it, it should be clear it came from you. Some of the details you need to highlight are invoice number, due date, total amount, a taxable amount and rate, and payment details.
Customers will look for these details when they are about to make a payment. To do that, you can use a larger font, bold text, or even use a different font color.
Payment Terms Placement
The payment terms should appear in a subtle footer, where they are visible, but they should not stand out more than the general and crucial details of the invoice. The best way to do that is to use the smallest font that is still legible.
Moreover, you must conclude the payment terms by thanking the client for doing business with you. Moreover, even if space is limited, don’t miss to include a “Thank You” note.
How Do You Make an Invoice Attractive?
You can make your invoice attractive in two steps. The first step is to add important invoice details. We recommend that you use invoice software to help you include important details that are unique to your business.
The next step is to add your brand colors and logos. These will give your invoice that professional look that will make it attractive. Moreover, you can get the help of a professional graphics designer.
A graphic designer can use their creativity to make your invoice look great. All you need to provide them are the invoice details and your brand colors. If you do not have your logo yet, they can also design one for you at a fee.
What Should My First Invoice Number Be?
The first invoice number can have any characters, but it should include “01” to indicate it is the first one. The other characters could be a code that identifies the client or the department issuing the invoice. All that is required when creating an invoice numbering system is unique and systematic.
Therefore, you can choose any invoice numbering style you want. However, it would help if you did not change it randomly. That makes it easy for clients to search and retrieve them, sort them, and associate them with your business.
Can I Design My Own Invoice?
Yes, you can create your own invoice as long as you follow the standard invoice format. However, different jurisdictions have different invoice format requirements, you have to make sure that your design meets your local and your client’s requirements.
You can do that using invoice software, or ask your accountant to guide you.
