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Lesson Info

Get Paid

getting paid, sending invoices is an incredibly important piece of the puzzle. I mean, I think a lot of people actually have a lot of anxiety around sending invoices because you're saying, alright, pay up, it's time to pay me. So having a really simple process, having a predictable process for sending invoices so that you can get paid is absolutely key. Let's talk about money, we need to talk about getting paid and stress free money management, you know, I have been a business owner now for over 13 years and getting paid sending invoices, it can still feel a little uncomfortable just a little, but I know when you're starting out or maybe you're making a big price increase, you're changing your business a little, all of those butterflies around getting paid and sending invoices can be a little overwhelming. So hopefully in this lesson, I'm gonna help you let those butterflies fly right on away, so we all want to get paid. That's one of the reasons we've got a business right? Getting pai...

d means getting our needs taken care of, and ultimately that's the purpose of your business. But sending invoices can often cause anxiety, but streamlining the process can really help. So what I want you to think about in this lesson is we think about building out that sustainable strategic service business framework. I don't just want to talk about getting paid today or sending out that very first invoice, I want to walk you through, how to think about getting paid on into the future, so that it's not something that is causing you anxiety on a regular basis, but instead is something that is set up is a strong foundation for the finances in your business moving forward and it's taking care of you moving forward as well. So again, as always, our guiding principle here is simplicity, anytime you can make your invoicing process simpler, more streamlined, it's going to cause you less anxiety and be less work. So first question I want to consider is how do I want to receive payments? What services am I going to use in order to connect the client's money to my bank account basically. Right. So there's a couple of services that I would definitely recommend using. One is stripe and the other is Paypal fiber workspace has those two integrations built right in so you can get paid through either one or both. Super easily. There are other options as well um, but I would really encourage you to take a look at the terms and conditions on any service outside of stripe and Paypal because for instance, Venmo doesn't have protection for business owners whereas Paypal and stripe do so things like that you want to think about when it comes to how you want to receive payments. Um, second when will you get paid? And I don't just mean like what's the deadline on this invoice but instead um, are you taking a deposit. When's the second payment due? Is this a monthly recurring service that you can set as a subscription when you think about how often you're getting paid when those payments are coming in, what work happens between payments? You feel a lot more confident sending those invoices out and receiving the money in your bank account as well. Third, and this is when I still struggle with to this day, how are you gonna track late payments? You want to make sure that if a client forgets about an invoice, maybe they took a look at it, They thought, yeah, I'll pay that tomorrow and then they don't, you want to make sure that you can follow up with that in a timely manner so that it's, it's not a big deal. It's just an easy reminder email. Right? Again, fiber workspace is going to make that super easy for you with those reminders built right in both reminders to your client and reminders to you as well. And then finally, how can you make payment as easy as possible, sending an invoice, that's not just a pdf but actually has a button on it that says pay me now, that's not actually what it says, but you get the idea um, having that button there that allows them to click it, enter their payment information and get that money to you is great for you because it means you get paid so much faster but it's also great for your client because they don't have to figure out how to pay you. It is baked straight into the invoice again, fiber workspace is going to make that super easy for you. So let's take a look at how to actually build out an invoice in fiber workspace so you can get paid the smart way. If you want to get paid, you gotta send your invoices. So let's take a look at how fiber workspace makes sending invoices to your clients. Super easy as always, we're going to go over to the left hand menu and click invoices. I'm gonna click new invoice today now keep in mind of course that we've already set up some recurring invoices using the proposals process and the invoicing process, but maybe you just need to send a quick one off uh invoice, maybe you've done an hour of consulting and it's not really something that you have set up in your fiber workspace already, you just need to send that invoice off or for me, I often have to send off one off invoices when I do a speaking engagement. So I'm going to just pull up a simple quick invoice, put in the right information and then send that off. So let's take a look at what that would look like in fiber workspace. So I'm gonna click just a quick invoice, love when things are straightforward um we'll use the example that I just gave, which is a speaker's fee, so I'm going to type that in as what I am invoicing for. I'm going to tape a speaker fee in and as always, a speaker fee is typically a flat fee but you've got options here, it could be per hour per day per item on and on, you can customize this as well, so if you're charging for something different than those things, you can add that in um and then maybe I also add a travel reimbursement in here as well, so we'll put that in and maybe that's that and that's a flat fee. You know, maybe I'm sending off receipts with that as well or maybe it's just something that I add on the top of my invoice. I take a look at that. Okay, that all looks right and I go next, we'll say this is for a new client because this is just an invoice that I am sending off for a one off project. Let's see, we'll put super conference organizer here is the company name. My contact name is joe smith. I'm gonna put joe's email in there we go, click next and now there's a rendering of my invoice right on the screen, I can check anything over, make sure it all looks good, I can edit any information that needs to be edited here, I can schedule the invoice as well um and I can change the due date, let's talk about due dates for invoices here for a second. Often we're going to use upon receipt, which basically means when someone gets the invoice, that invoice is due but we might also want to think about invoices that are due in the future. A seven day window, a 15 day window, a 30 day window. There are different options here depending on your contract with the client that you're invoicing. So a lot of times of speakers organization or you know, if you're doing a freelance writing project, they're going to tell you what the timeframe is that they're paying you in. It can be annoying but that's how that works for certain kinds of clients. So they might say we'll pay you within 30 days. So I'm gonna click the 30 days tab there, mark that it is being issued today, click save, check everything over Yeah, my due date there looks good, I can add the address and if I want to and then I'm gonna click next this is the screen where we're going to compose the email that's going to go out with that invoice, look that over, personalize that if I want to and then I'm gonna click sent. Boom invoice sent, it's going to be sent with a button that allows my client to pay me directly from that email they'll be able to enter their credit card or pay me via Paypal and that money is going to come straight to me super fast, Super easy. It's a service to me, it's a service to my client and that's how you make sending invoices easy with fiber workspace. Now, another aspect of getting paid is actually paying people. Right? So what fiber workspace offers to allow you to track the payments that you make is something called shoebox. This is super helpful. The idea behind shoeboxes that back in the day. Or maybe for some of us see still when you receive a paper receipt, let's say you go off to the store, the office supply store and you buy a new printer, you take that paper receipt and you throw it in a shoe box, right? And then at the end of the year you go through that and you pull your hair out and your accountant is like, I really need that information now and you're like, I don't have it. The shoebox function on fiber workspace is gonna make this so much easier for you. So once you're on the shoebox panel you're gonna click new file and the idea here is that you're going to upload an image. So I'm gonna cancel out of this for just a second. We're gonna take a screenshot just of this screen as an example of how this works. But you're gonna screenshot your receipt or take a picture of it with your phone or really any way that you can get that receipt recorded into a visual image. Super easy. So I'm gonna find that screenshot, click open and now that image is saved into my shoebox from there, I can change this, change the name of the file to make it easy to find. So I might put travel receipts and that's all there is to it. Uh from here. If all I want to do is track that image or have a copy of that image in my shoebox. I can leave it go, but I can also go in and create an XP. So I'm going to create an expense here. If it's an expense of the business, my business, I'm going to leave it on tax deductible. If it is an expense that I am passing on to my client, I can click billable to client but we'll leave it on tax deductible now because I think that's probably how most people would use it. We can say it's a $ expense. I got it from target. The purpose was office supplies. That's what I'm going to put in other expenses as well. There we go. And then I can hit create and now that I've added that expense, you'll notice that the receipt is no longer in my shoebox instead, it's in my transactions and I can see that that expense is accounted for here. And fiber workspace goes ahead and takes my total revenue and subtracts that expense from it. So you can see That instead of $500 or $440, there's now $430 tracked in my revenue and expenses. So I can start to see, Okay, money comes in. Money goes out. That sounds really simple, but it's a key part of really understanding what it costs to run your business so that you can make sure you can pay yourself appropriately, which is a key piece of financial sustainability, so that's how to use the shoebox function.