What is an Invoice Form and why is important?
An invoice form is a document you send to your customer after you have provided them with goods or services.
It declares clearly in writing what the customer has purchased, when, in what quantity, and the total cost including taxes, such as VAT.
Invoice forms also express your payment terms to your customer, this includes your expectations regarding date of payment and what, if any, the potential penalties will be for late, missing, or incorrect payments.
The invoice form is a legal document that creates a binding agreement between yourself and your customers and can therefore be utilised if you ever need to take more formal action, particularly in the cases of overdue or missing payments.
Advantages of using Invoice Forms.
- Invoice forms allow you to clearly keep track of all your sales and payments and ensures that you can quickly identify and follow up on any payments that may not have arrived on time or haven’t been paid in full.
- Allows you to identify which projects you invoice the most and therefore the activities that your business should spend more time and money on improving.
- Invoice forms are a useful record-keeping tool and ensure you can easily evidence compliance to
How to create your own Invoice Form.
When planning to create your own invoice form, you firstly need to consider the specific information you need to capture using the form to ensure you receive the correct payment for your goods and services promptly.
For an invoice form you need to think about all the important information that needs to be recorded regarding the goods or services you have provided for a customer, such as quantity, cost and expected date of payment.
You should begin your invoice form with two section to record basic information about your business and your customer.
This should include fields to records names and addresses and crucially for your own business a field to record your VAT reg number so your customer can correctly process the payment.
You should also include a section to record important information about the invoice.
For example, in our free template which can be downloaded below, we have included sections to record the invoice number, the date it was issued, the date the payment is due, and the terms of payment.
Next a section to record information about the goods and services that were provided should be featured including fields to record their quantity, cost, and any tax.
We recommend using a tabular format to record and present this information as it is clearer and easier to read ensuring your customer clearly understands how the costs have been determined.
Finally, for extra clarity we also recommend adding a small section at the bottom of your form to summarise the key information from the invoice including the subtotal before VAT, the cost of VAT, and the total including VAT.
Using Jomo247 to manage your invoices.
Keeping on top of a task as demanding as invoice management can become a challenge for any business no matter their size.
A lot of businesses still rely upon traditional methods such as spreadsheets to manage their invoices, which are then emailed to customers. This process can often be inefficient, long-winded, and subject to human error.
With Jomo247 you can create one master invoice form templates which can be accessed and easily filled in by all employees.
Once a form is completed it is stored in Jomo247 and can be quickly accessed whenever you need cutting out the faff of downloading, altering, and emailing spreadsheet files.
However, if you do need to download the collected information to store elsewhere or compare different invoice data at once you can do so with ease.
Instead of emailing your customers which can slow communication, with Jomo247 you can invite your customers to your hub for no extra fee – we charge per action NOT per user.
With our permissions and roles, you can control what your customers can access and view on your help helping to keep your confidential information safe.
Using our tagging feature, you can reference all your important financial documentation making it quick to search for and locate during audits or reviews by your accountant.
If you would like to find out more about how Jomo247 can help your business click here.
