We’ve Made You a Free Invoice Generator. (And Here’s Why.)

Small business owners looking to free some time and remove some hassle from their weeks ought to consider invoice automation—and one of the best ways to do so is to locate a free invoice generator. BizXpert is proud to offer a new invoice generator as one of its many small business solutions.

We’ve noted before that invoicing is something of a necessary evil. On the one hand, you can’t not do it. Entrepreneurs and freelancers alike must invoice if they wish to get paid—and the better your invoicing processes, the more likely it is that you will get paid in a timely manner. At the same time, nobody actually likes invoicing, and in fact it can be a major drain on your time, to say nothing of a headache. So what’s a small business owner to do?

The simple answer is to automate the process—ensuring that invoicing gets done, but that it requires little time or commitment from you. The question of how you automate is a little pricklier, and there are a few options worth noting—including invoice templates, invoice generators, and invoicing software.

A New Invoice Generator from BizXpert

At BizXpert we want to provide you with plenty of flexibility and ample options, which is why we are proud to announce our new invoice generator—a free invoice maker you can access online and use to simplify your invoicing processes. It’s available here.

We consider this to be sort of the “lite” version of BizXpert, which means it does not have the inventory management or appointment setting features you get when you download our app. The invoice generator is decidedly simple—and in many ways, that’s its greatest virtue.

Invoices really should be simple. They need to be thorough, of course—they need to convey all the information your customers need to make prompt payment—but they also need to be direct and focused, conveying their important contents in a way that customers can grasp more or less instantly. If your invoice confuses your customers, then you’re in trouble.

Using our free invoice maker, then, you can create some simple invoices for your company. It’s incredibly easy: You can click on pretty much any element of the invoice generator to customize it, inputting your own customer-specific or company-specific information. You can then head to the bottom of the page where you’ll see options to either e-mail the invoice directly to your customer, or else download it to your machine as a PDF file.

The big advantage of using our invoice generator is that it ensures you’ve got a simple yet thorough, well-designed invoice to send your customers—but of course, there are some other free invoicing tools worth noting.

Weighing Your Options for Free Invoicing

Invoicing tools exist on a spectrum. On one end, you have invoicing software programs—many of which are good, but most of which are quite expensive. At the opposite extreme you have made-from-scratch invoices—basically, starting with a new Excel or Word document every time you need to send an invoice.

The best options for free invoicing exist between those two extremes. In brief, they are:

1. Use invoicing templates. You can download invoicing templates in PDF, Word, or Excel formats, customize them, and send them to your clients. BizXpert is proud to make these resources available! The advantage here is that you can rest assured your invoices are consistently and intelligently designed. The problem, of course, is that this doesn’t offer the level of automation you might need, as you still have to put some legwork into invoice management.
2. Use an invoice generator. Go online, customize an invoice, and hit send, then download the PDF and save it to your files. For a lot of entrepreneurs, this is a great option, offering just the kind of simplicity that is needed.
3. Use an invoicing app. Of course, what we ultimately recommend is that you invest some time into learning how our BizXpert app works; this provides all the advantages of the free invoice maker but countless other bells and whistles, besides, including more robust options for invoice management.

How to Make an Invoice

Still, some entrepreneurs will prefer to exert a bit more control over the invoicing process, which means making their own invoices. If this is the boat you are in, there are still plenty of advantages to using our free invoice generator or our invoicing templates; the more time you spend studying these tools, the better you will understand the science of invoice design.

And make no mistake about it: Invoice design is critically important. A well-designed invoice will ensure prompt payment; it will minimize delinquencies; and it will actually enhance the customer experience. It’s worth investing in!

Spend a few minutes studying our invoice generator and you will get a sense of the elements every good invoice needs—including:

• The customer’s full contact information—not just their name!
• The full contact information of your small business.
• A clear label—INVOICE—that leaves no doubt as to what the document is and what it is intended to do.
• An item-by-item breakdown of the products or services rendered, including the price of each. Also include any applicable services charges, fees, etc.
• A total price/amount due at the bottom of the invoice, showing the customer his or her responsibility.

We also recommend that you include some notice about your payment policies—when is the invoice due? What are the consequences or penalties for late payments? It also helps to include some personal comments on your invoice, even if it’s just a please and a thank you. Again: When handled properly, the invoice process can actually enhance customer loyalty.

Two Ways to Invoice

Once you master invoice design—whether by using our templates, generator, or app—you will have just a single decision left to make: Should you send an electronic invoice or printable invoices?

There are advantages to both, perhaps. Having a printable invoice ensures that you have a hard copy, and sending an invoice through snail mail can lend a certain sense of prestige and professionalism. Ultimately, though, we favor online invoicing. It’s simpler for you and it makes payment easier for the customer. Additionally, your invoices can arrive much quicker, which makes it more likely that you will get paid in a timely manner.

The good news is that you ultimately don’t have to choose just one or the other, no matter which free invoicing tool you use—our invoice generator, our invoice templates, or the BizXpert app. All three have easy ways to send your invoice, yet they also have some simple functions for printing and saving your invoices. You can feel free to do both methods, or to decide on a customer-by-customer basis.

So what’s the bottom line for entrepreneurs? Simple: You have to invoice, but you don’t have to make it hard on yourself. There are plenty of tools to make invoicing simple and seamless, and BizXpert is happy to offer them to you.