A Simple Guide to Invoice Templates

What makes a business successful? Often, success is defined as profitability. Profitability is the result of working hard to make customers happy, creating a loyal customer base in the process.

A big part of creating that loyal customer base is managing and tracking invoices efficiently and accurately. This helps you keep up with the money that flows into your business, allows you to be transparent with your customers about what they are paying for, and reveals who your returning customers are—so you can invest in building relationships with them.

While invoicing can be challenging, invoice templates can simplify the process. And technological advancements—like invoicing software—make it even easier.

Today, we’ll explore what invoice templates are, how they can help you secure on-time payments from your customers, and what sophisticated invoicing software, such as an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, can do to transform invoicing from a chore to an opportunity.

Understanding Invoice Templates

Invoice templates are pre-made, customizable documents that can be tailored according to the specific details of each sale. Information—such as services or goods provided, payment terms, contact information, and contract requirements—can be prefilled or updated as needed.

Designing Your Invoice Template

When creating a functional and professional invoice template, you can choose from a few different formats. These include PDF, Word, and Excel invoices.

There are a number of pros and cons to each option, but many businesses prefer PDFs because they can easily be encrypted and password protected. PDFs also display documents exactly as they were created—with no formatting idiosyncrasies.

Regardless of which format you choose, your invoice must include the following details:

• The word “Invoice.”
• Your business’s name, address, phone number, and email address.
• Your customer’s name, address, phone number, and email address.
• A unique invoice number for tracking payments and managing overdue invoices.
• Invoice dates (e.g., when the transaction occurred, when the invoice was sent, and when the payment is due).
• A description of the product or service via line items.
• A clear statement of how much money is due—including taxes, delivery fees, and discounts.
• Payment terms (e.g., methods of payment you accept).
• Payment information.

Design-wise, your invoice should be a simple document that only includes the necessary details. Clean-looking and easy-to-understand invoices reduce customer confusion. Uncomplicated invoicing also helps you avoid delayed payments, which improves your cash flow and financial management.

However, “simple” doesn’t mean “devoid of critical marketing information,” such as your business logo. Part of a business’s marketing plan is ensuring consistency on all business documents, and this encompasses your invoices. Ultimately, such branding consistency will grow brand awareness and build trust with your clients.

Creating Invoice Templates with an ERP Solution

So, you’ve chosen your design, decided what format to use, and know what information you need to include. But where do you go from here?

A quick internet search will return many free, easy-to-download, printable invoice templates. These cover the gamut of styles, from pro forma and progress invoices to past due and recurring invoices, and they’re set up and ready for you to manually insert your data.

But manually filling out your invoices is a potentially costly, employee intensive, and error-rich endeavor. Fortunately, invoicing software, in the form of a comprehensive ERP solution, like Acumatica, can help.

 Invoice Template Configuration settings in Acumatica 

Acumatica delivers accounting automation software that streamlines invoice creation with an automated invoice generator and automatic formulas. Acumatica also provides records storage, tax calculations, bill payments, payroll management, and more within a single, centralized solution.

Instead of you having to manually search multiple, disconnected applications for each customer’s invoice information, Acumatica automatically pulls appropriate—and real-time—information. It then uses that data to properly format the invoice with native artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities. Should you need to customize one or many invoices, Acumatica enables you to do that too.

With Acumatica invoicing, you can expect faster task turnarounds, immediate data retrieval, increased accuracy and security, and improved customer service.

Conclusion

Invoice templates are an essential tool for businesses, and invoicing software, like Acumatica, makes business easier by helping you create visually appealing and concise invoices while streamlining and automating the entire billing process. This goes a long way towards helping you earn your customers’ trust and approval.

Says Acumatica customer Tammy Raub, CFO, Mozaic, “Our contacts are in the system, and we can email invoices, eliminating double entry. We are in the process of converting billing spreadsheets to direct key-ins by the departments, and we know our aging buckets now, which were difficult to figure out in the old system.”

She adds, “Every time we do a weekly receivable billing, we put an invoice into Acumatica, and that allows us to know if there are any billings outstanding. We know that we haven’t received them by looking in Acumatica and seeing what’s outstanding. So that helps us with our aging and collections.”