HighPower Freelance Project Software: The Invoice Reports
Software to help you know your financial numbers!
We have been using HighPower Freelance Project Software for eleven months now, and really love it. The number one rule about running your own business is that you have to make a profit, or you will be out of business. There are lots of other good things which you can do for your clients, employees, friends, family, and community if your business is making a profit, but it all begins, or ends, right there.
An important part of making a profit in your business is invoicing. With a good invoicing system you can ask your clients to reimburse you for services rendered, and you can keep track of who has paid you and who has not. I am happy to report that the invoicing system in HighPower Freelance software is really robust. There are very many invoicing options available to create, edit, and track your invoices. In this post, I just want to highlight one small part of it, and that is the “Financial Reports” section of the Business tab.
Let’s look at it.
There are six “Find” actions which you can take, and two types of reports. Let’s look at each one;
- Find Open Invoices
These are any unpaid or open invoices. If it is unpaid for any reason, it will show up on this report. Using this report will save you a lot of lost revenue each year. - Find Ready Invoices
These are invoices which you have finished editing, and they are now ready to be sent to your clients so that you can get paid. The system helps you to take the final step of delivering the invoice to your clients by helping you to identify the invoices ready to go out. - Find Old Invoices
This search finds any invoices older than 30 days. Once an invoice is more than 30 days old, you don’t have a lot of time to get it taken care of, so this button will help you to quickly follow up on delinquent payments. - Find Invoices by Date
This is a general search in which you can enter any date range and find all invoices created during that time period. - Find Client Deposits
Some businesses ask their clients to make a deposit into a payment “bucket”, from which they bill against as they do the work. (This saves a lot of invoicing and payment headaches later on.) It is important to keep track of those, so that they don’t get co-mingled with company funds. (At HighPower, we keep a separate bank account for these funds.). But either way, you need to track those, and with HighPower Freelance software, it is very easy to keep an eye on these ‘unearned funds’. - Find Payments
Sometimes you just need to confirm who paid what and when. That’s what this search button does for you.
Then there are two detailed financial reports, the Invoice Report and the Income Report. They sound similar but they have different functions.
The Invoice Report is a detailed query to find any and all Invoices in the system using selected search criteria. The two criteria are the Invoice Date, and the Invoice Type. Invoice types can be things like “Deposits, Development, Licenses, Hosting, Products, or All”. Run this report and get a nicely formatted report showing you all relevant information.
The other report is the Income Report. You can do a search based on a certain date range, and then choose to generate either just a Summary Report for that date range, or a Detailed Report for that date range. In either case, a search will be performed upon the Worklogs for that date range and generate a nicely formatted report.
The difference between the Invoice and the Income report is this. The Invoice report performs a search upon Invoices which have already been generated. But the Income report does a search upon Worklogs whether they have been sent to Invoices or not. Remember that in HighPower Freelance Software, the individual Worklogs are the building blocks of an Invoice. Each Worklog is one line item on an invoice. So while the Invoice report looks at all the Invoices which have been generated, the Income report looks at every Worklog item which makes up those Invoices. Subtle, but important, distinction.
So that is the Financial Reports section of the “Actions & Reports” section of the Business tab. There are many other types of reports which can be run from this section, but these are the ones specifically focused upon income and finances. Ask for a demo today of HighPower Freelance software.