Invoicing & Payment Processing

Transcript

Transcript of the recorded lesson. Recorded 2023, reviewed 2026.

In this video I'm going to talk about invoicing and billing. When I first started Lister Pros I used PayPal for invoicing since I had no budget. This process was tedious and a manual one at that. After a year we switched from PayPal to FreshBooks. That lasted a few years and then we outgrew it and changed to QuickBooks online. QuickBooks is what we are currently using today. If you don't mind the monthly fee and can afford it we recommend using QuickBooks. You may also want to consider FreshBooks as a cheaper alternative. If you have no budget then using PayPal or another software platform that is free works as well.

When I started getting busy I dreaded doing invoicing and did it once a week. I thought this was a good idea but waiting a week to bill doesn't make for a good customer experience as sometimes the charge would catch the customer off guard as they assumed you already charged them. I recommend billing shortly after delivering your products to your customers. In regards to payment processing we have always used Stripe. Stripe can be integrated into many order forms making it easy to capture billing information. I have found that you are better off being in control of charging customer cards than sending invoices to customers and having them pay.

You will have fewer outstanding invoices and a higher collection rate when you charge your customers yourself. For our overdue invoices we send reminder emails once a month. We have found that this helps with collecting on past due invoices. Some customers may also want to pay with checks but these should be few and far between. In my opinion it is not a good use of time to process checks so that is why we encourage using cards and less processing huge payments. It's important to make it easy for your customers to do business with you and that means being flexible with their payment preferences as well. One thing that we have found extremely helpful when invoicing is using Zapier to automate the

process of invoice creation. We use Zapier extensively in our business for all sorts of tasks. Regarding invoicing Zapier can take information from an order form and create an invoice automatically as long as the form and accounting software you are using is supported by Zapier. So whether you are using gravity forms or another supported ordering system you can save a lot of time by using Zapier. So just to recap we currently use QuickBooks online for our invoicing and striped for our payment processing. We know there are many alternatives out there so feel free to find alternatives that work best for you and your business. That's going to do it for this video. Reach out if you have any questions. We will see you guys on the next one.