The best way to create an invoice for consulting work is to bill on a pre-agreed cycle or as soon as you have finished the project or calculated your billable hours.
Picking a specifically designed invoice template for consulting from Invoice Ninja can streamline your admin, reduce the likelihood of queries, and ensure your paperwork is tailored and comprehensive.
Cash flow is imperative to independent consultants and small businesses, so a well-organized invoicing system helps expedite your payments and provide a professional service to your clients.
What to Include in a Consultation Invoice
Invoice templates are a simplified, efficient way to manage your invoicing admin. What receipts do consultants receive after an invoice? If you’ve emailed an invoice with a ‘read receipt’ function enabled, that might evidence delivery but few businesses will issue a physical receipt to acknowledge your invoice.
This factor is why your invoicing is so important, as it provides a history of bills issued, dates raised, payment deadlines, and revenues for tax reporting.
Consulting invoice templates comprise all the essential elements of a professional, customized document:
- Your unique company logo and consulting business name
- Contact details for yourself and your billable client
- Invoice breakdowns, including the issue date, due date, and total payable
- Itemized consultation services, expenses, and charges included
By following a template, you can ensure all the relevant information is featured, such as applicable sales taxes, avoiding unnecessary queries or the additional admin associated with clearing up discrepancies.
Best Practice When Raising Invoices for Consultation Work
If you work in a team, having one person responsible for clerical work and invoicing is advisable to avoid duplications and potentially doubling up on workflows. However, you will likely need to manage your invoices yourself if you are a freelance consultant.
Tips to streamline your invoicing system and billing processes include:
- Making sure fee structures, amounts payable, and the expected total cost of the consultation work are clear from day one: If you have a terms of sale document, this can be a useful way to avoid issues later.
- Keeping accurate records of time spent on each element of a consultation to ensure you aren’t losing out by forgetting to invoice billable hours, including travel, where appropriate
- Creating agreements before work begins stating which expenses your client is expected to cover and which are included within your consulting rates–examples such as research, reporting, and travel time could all constitute billable expenses
- Raising an invoice without delay, ensuring your work is still fresh in your client’s mind; they can verify the hours or weeks worked and approve your invoice promptly
Payment terms vary between consultants and may depend on the consultation services you offer, but asking for a deposit upfront can be a good way to protect your business from non-payment or slow payers.
Deposits can start from 10% of the project total, extending to 50% in advance, giving you the assurance that your client is committed to the consultation. However, you must keep accurate invoicing records and make sure you subtract the deposit paid from your final payable invoice.
The Advantages of Invoicing Templates for Consultants
If you are juggling several simultaneous projects, keeping track of your admin and invoicing can be difficult. An invoicing template takes the stress out of accounts management, ensuring each document is consistent and branded and uses sequential invoice numbering.
Prompts to include itemized charges and expenses assist in calculating the time spent on each consultation project, and adding in a payment due date is a gentle reminder for clients to remit the amount owed on time.
Invoice Ninja offers a range of functionalities, including:
- Recurring billing if you perform the same tasks or amount of work for a client regularly or periodically
- Customization to either tailor an invoice template to your business or design an original template from scratch
- Integrated payment links with a secure connection to your preferred payment gateway to speed up remittances
- Automatic reminders when payments are made, or invoices fall overdue if you opt for one of our premium account packages
- Bulk invoice creation, with the ability to raise credit notes and quotations with the same design and branding as your invoices
Once you have created each professional invoice, you can send it to your client as a PDF attachment and insert your client’s e-signature for security.
