Did you spend the last year invoicing your clients with a beautifully designed InDesign invoice template or Word even? Are you dreading having to prepare all of your financial information for your accountant, or doing your own taxes? Maybe you’re just starting out and not invoicing all that frequently. Or perhaps your most pressing concern was having awesome looking invoices, sure to impress your new clients and re-enforce how professional you are.

STOP THE MADNESS!

Spending your time copying and pasting into Excel or using a calculator to total up your earnings for the year is definitely not how you want to be kicking off the new year. Or worse, how you want to be spending late nights in April, or just prior to your tax deadline, trying desperately to figure out how much you invoiced and expensed over the past year.

InDesign is an awesome product for making print layouts. It’s time to make a resolution to invoicing differently in 2012. Consider any option that meets the following three criteria:

1) Keep running totals of all your invoices, categorized per client, automatically.

In Billings, in the source list select Reports and then choose “Invoice Details by Client”. Then choose the date range you’re looking for and click run. You’ll get a report that shows how much you’ve made from each client along with details from each invoice.

2) Give you totals of all sales taxes you’ve collected for much easier tax remittance.

If you collect sales tax, you need to be able to easily total up how much you’ve collected either on an annual or quarterly basis. Even if you’ve tracked the grand totals in a spreadsheet, having to go through each invoice manually to pull out this data, or calculate it based on your totals can be extremely annoying. Again in the Reports section of Billings, choose “Taxes Collected”, set the timeframe to pull data from, and click run. Both you and the taxman are happy.

3) Has some sort of expense tracking capability, preferably one that helps you keep track of mileage and categorize your expenses.

Even if you don’t bill back expenses to your clients, it makes tax time quite a bit easier when you’ve done the inputting all year long instead of spending days on end searching through shoeboxes of faded and wrinkled receipts. In Billings, categories are defined in Preferences which is found in the Billings menu. Select the labels pane and then choose the categories tab. I add in each expense category I use with the prefix “Expense:” so they’re all grouped together when I’m selecting it in the slip entry window. To see how much you’ve spent, look under Reports > TimeSlip > Expenses By Category or Expense Tax Report. Take these to your accountant, or tax software if you’re doing your own and enjoy writing off all your costs of doing business.

What’s Your Time Worth?

Consider what your normal billing rate is and than estimate how much time you spent organizing all of this after the fact. Any solution you choose will pay itself back in no time.

No matter which way you go, having a system in place from the beginning of the year will make the task seem so much more manageable. Having a pile of invoices and receipts three feet tall is just the sort of job that gets procrastinated over and over again until the very last minute. Setting yourself up with a simple system that you make time for once a week, or once a month, becomes infinitely more manageable. In our next article, we’ll look at some easy ways of customizing the invoices Billings generates so your clients will be as impressed with your invoice as they are with your work.

If you’re an independent freelancer, or own a small business or startup, or even if you think your role at a more established company has nothing to do with “sales”, everyone sells. From the custodian to the CEO, everyone is responsible for representing their company and this either helps or hurts a business’s bottom line. I think many of us don’t think of ourselves in this way, or even actively dislike the word “sales”. But the reality is that there are simple activities everyone does to gain new clients, and how efficiently you do these things will directly impact your revenue. Having a habitual system that you follow, even when the “real work” of business monopolizes your time, will help your cash-flow improve and avoid missing out on the big opportunities you are seeking.

No Magic Words

If you are looking for magic phrases to say at closing, or ways to convince people their objections aren’t valid (“The sale starts when you hear the first ‘no.’” – Some-guy-from-the-80′s), this probably isn’t going to be for you. Nothing is worse for sales than putting on some fake persona and saying things you wouldn’t normally. Be real. Improving your sales has more to do with forming good habits than anything you could possibly say.

What We Believe

We at Marketcircle very strongly believe that a key aspect to growing a business is focusing on getting new business. It seems like an obvious statement, but I’m sure we can all think of someone we’ve met in our lives whose default mode is to sit back and wait for customers to come through the doors. While this may work for some companies who have worked for years to build a brand and make some of the greatest consumer products ever (see Apple, Inc.). But for the rest of us, sales and revenue may take a bit more effort and hustle.

Where to Start?

I’d like to start by talking about sales cycles and how understanding your own sales cycle can help improve your cash flow.

Without going all MBA on this, cash flow is the movement of money into or out of a business (as defined by the borg collective). Usually, one prefers to have more coming in than going out. I believe this, in financial circles, is called positive cash flow. So increasing sales obviously results in more money coming in and we should be good to go, right? Well, only if you have enough **time** to sell to the next customer before the repo man comes to take away your Aeron chair. Think of your sales cycle as the time it takes from first identifying a prospect to finally signing a contract and receiving payment from your new customer.

I have a friend who is starting out his career as an architect and is trying to build up his own independent practice. He told me about this guy he met who bought a huge old mansion downtown and was looking to develop it into apartment units. Four months later, we ran into each other again and I naturally asked about it. He said that they had only just recently finalized contracts and gotten the project underway. I remember him clearly saying, “I had no idea how long it was going to take to get everything sorted out before we could start work”.

Just like most people who decide to start a business, we tend to focus our efforts on our craft first and doing good work and hope that the business stuff doesn’t take too long. Problem is if you have no idea how long it takes to close another deal, you can easily get caught off guard and find yourself staring at next month with no projects booked and thus no money coming in. I asked my friend to recall how long it took from meeting that guy to getting a cheque from him.  I suggested that if it took four months last time, and he has scheduled this project to take nine months, then as of five months from now, he better have met his next customer. And then, he’ll need to juggle his time between completing his current project and developing that next sale. He said, “Oh,” his lip slightly quivering and with what looked like a small tear developing in his left eye.

So, do you know how long your sales cycle is? If not, find the last three (or more) contracts you signed and then go through your email and figure out when your first met those clients. Average those times out and now you’ve got a very rough idea how long your cycle is. In the next article, we’ll discuss some ways of shortening your cycle so ramen cup’o'soup can become fancy japanese udon noodles instead.

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Due to poor weather conditions in our area the power is currently out in our office.