How a freelancer needs to prepare an hourly invoice template

In today’s era work from home has become quite popular. Thanks to the flexibility associated with it, a vast population of people is enjoying being a freelancer.

However, with freedom comes the need to generate invoices to the clients so the payments keep happening smoothly. As a freelancer you are billing on an hourly rate, creating an invoice for that becomes a tough deal.

Here we tell you 3 tips of how to prepare an hourly invoice template with ease as a freelancer:

What to include in the invoice

In the invoice that you are preparing, you must take care that you have tracked your hours using a tracking tool. Though you can always use a spreadsheet to do so that is an ancient method and you can trust an app to handle this work for you.

The terms that you need to include in the invoice are the billable hours applicable. According to the contract you have signed, it should be the actual hours you spent in completing a project for that particular client. In most cases, you may not actually be working the exact hour and you should know how much to increment to the closest hour. Some freelancers increment by 15 minutes while others take 30 minutes into consideration.

Apart from that, there would be times when you are doing certain small tasks related to the project but you are unable to track them as they are taking less time than intended. For such purposes, you have to take a call whether you want to charge the client or leave it as it is.

How much to charge

Obviously, each client would be different and how much you charge would be dependent on the effort his/her work requires. You can decide if you want to keep a stable rate per project or hourly basis would be fine. For demanding customers, you would have to change the rates as per the work they are asking you to do.

Invoice template headers

When you start writing your invoice template, you first need to write down the sum of the billable hours per project or task. Instead of having a product column, you can change its name to “services/ project name/task name.” In place of the quantity section, you need to change it to a measurement unit related to time. This could be anything from hours, seconds, working days, etc.

When you know how to track the billable as well as the non -billable hours, it would help you invoice the client for the exact hours you have worked. Being able to do so, shows your professionalism and leads you to sign better contracts in the future.

Conclusion

Creating an hourly invoice is simple once you get the hang of doing it. In most cases, a few months would be needed to bring things into place. Often hourly invoices can be confusing yet if you know how to deal with it you can make your payment process rather simple. Usage of appropriate apps to tackle the task in hand can also reduce your burden to some extent.