7 Ways An Online Invoice Generator Can Bootstrap Your Way To A Successful Business
Whether you’re a small business, an operating freelancer or an aspiring startup owner, you’ll know that sometimes the best progress you can make is simply starting. Rather than planning and strategizing and overthinking. When it comes to actually making money? Starting off with a free online invoice generator is a powerful way to building a successful business online.
At the birth of a new business, momentum is often the most important thing. There is nothing wrong with keeping systems super lightweight. This may sound chaotic but it’s actually incredibly useful. This is the phase of your business where you get to test what works and what doesn’t. Throw that pasta up against the wall and see what sticks, so to speak.
Keeping Things Light
A lightweight environment is ideal for bootstrapping your small business and shipping your product. Using a free online generator is the kind of lightweight solution you need to begin invoicing right away. The prime objective — and your major metric of success when you’re first launching — should be revenue.
Even if they are free, invoice templates in Word or Excel don’t necessarily provide a Do-It-Yourself environment for the purposes of an invoice specifically. If you rely on an online invoice generator, you’ll be able to function in a lightweight space, uncluttered, and focused on one thing only: generating some good old fashioned cash.
Multiple Paydays
Considering the fact that your main goal when taking your small business off the ground is get a steady cash flow coming in. Online invoice generator can respond to the needs of your business and clients as it grows.
As you build a steady roster of clients, whether through one-time projects or recurring retainers, you’re going to want to bill multiple clients at a time. Working 12 or 14 hour days to get your business to a point of success is not unheard of in entrepreneurship. Keeping track of payments with online invoices are a quick and easy process rather than time-consuming and tedious.
Simple Is Beautiful
When creating invoices using online generators, the interface is usually simple and minimal. But still including all the features for smart invoicing you would need. Not only are you billing multiple clients, you want a solution for invoicing. Solution that is fast and has most of the logic built in already.
This means that your fast-growing business needs to have the ability to set up invoices in multiple currencies, spaces for notes, discounts, custom VAT and any Terms and Conditions along with the most basic function, which is itemized costs.
Using an interface that provides only the options that are absolutely essential to billing — such as taxes, currencies, company information and invoice numbers — means that you’re able to keep the most important information right up top, easily accessible to both your client as well as for your own accounting purposes.
Ever-Accessible
Online invoice and billing solutions, quite contrary to the Excel invoice template experience, are accessible from anywhere in the world. As long as you have an Internet connection, you’re good to go. zistemo’s own free invoice generator is available right online and allows small businesses and entrepreneurs to access their invoices in several ways.
Besides simply emailing invoices, users can choose to send as a PDF, print and mark invoice numbers for accounting and tracking purposes. It also allows users to access a history of invoices, a useful feature when tracking past clients’ data and payment behaviour.
Templates Made Easy
Nothing is more satisfying to a new small business online than solutions that take most of the guesswork and thinking for you. While you definitely are not averse to “Do It Yourself” solutions for their cost-effectiveness. This doesn’t mean that you want your company to compromise on quality and professionalism.
zistemo’s invoice templates are just one example of the new standard small businesses set for themselves through invoicing. The truth is that free invoice templates in Word can be rather clunky because the software was created for editing documents, not invoices. And Excel-based invoice templates, while great for formulaic computing and accounting, never look quite as professional as you’d like.
Smart online invoicing solutions like zistemo, however, allow small businesses to pop in logos, company information and custom Terms & Conditions. A branded template that is powerful enough to give you specific invoicing functions? Yes, please!
Paperless Billing
Paper or paperless: no matter which side you land with this eternal debate, online invoicing has taken the guesswork out of the process for small businesses and entrepreneurs. The bottom line is that you’re looking for flexibility and your chosen solution should put that front and centre.
While users can choose to send invoices to clients via email, they may also choose to print a hard-copy. If they’re appending the invoice to an external email or as part of a set of other documents, users can choose to save the generated invoice as a PDF. It’s just one more way small businesses are working not only faster but smarter.
Access Payment History
If done right, your online invoicing solution can also provide you a sneak peek into customer data. This makes for really useful customer relationship management information. Feel free to plug in these initial observations into your CRM software. How, exactly? Via payment history.
Solutions like zistemo Invoicing Software allow users to access payment history. This can be key in identifying client demographics, recurring revenue, the most popular products and services and where services are being rendered (or products being shipped to) the most.
This way, it’s clear that payment history is key. Not only in understanding a client’s behaviour in terms of payment, but can also actually spearhead marketing initiatives. Relying on an Excel invoice template, in this same case, for example, would require you to trawl through multiple files, accessible only on your own computer or small business’s network. Not so with online invoice generators, since everything is readily available in a couple of clicks.
