One of the greatest challenges that freelancers face is maintaining balance between the hours spent working on projects and the hours spent on administrative tasks such as billing, equipment or software maintenance, and taxes. As a freelancer, you are a one person team who is equally responsible for taking care of the daily needs of your business and the needs of your clients. In this blog series, I will be providing tips and tricks on how to balance this time to help streamline your internal operations and project work. For this chapter, we will be taking a look at the benefits of digital invoicing services.

Utilize digital bookkeeping and invoicing software

There are a ton of options available to you, and I urge you to do your homework on them before you rush straight for Quickbooks. While Quickbooks is a great tool for most businesses, freelancers often have unique business models and there are some solutions that might make it easier to accept credit cards and track invoice payments.

One of my favorite alternatives is Freshbooks, which is was completely redesigned in 2017 to provide customers with a modern bookkeeping and invoicing experience. One great feature is the invoicing financing feature, which makes it possible to receive credit card payments and other digital payments for your invoices right away. That, coupled with an efficient invoice-to-payment process, makes Freshbooks a great solution for any freelancer who is looking to accept credit cards.

Whichever solution you choose, the point is that you can easily reduce the amount of administrative time that you have to allocate towards invoicing each week by leveraging the power of digital invoicing software. These platforms allow you to partner with a credit card processing company, so that you can streamline your business operations from top to bottom.

Determine if you want to accept credit cards, ACH payments, or both

Its great to give your customers the option of paying via credit card, but you are typically going to end up paying for their air miles to do so. How nice of you!

Well…maybe a little too nice. For larger transactions, this could become very costly for you, so doing your homework can really help you find the sweet spot between convenience and cost. The first step for this is to map out your projected income for the year and organize the size of the expected transactions in three groups – small, medium and large. If you have last year’s reports to refer to, use those. Then set a transaction size limit for credit card transactions, so that your customers can still use a credit card to pay online invoices for the small, more frequent invoices.

Conclusion

For most freelancers, accepting credit cards is a must. So take a look at the digital invoicing services out there that can help you elevate your invoicing game and free up time for you to focus on doing what you love. If you need help finding an invoicing service that works well for you, get in touch with NXGEN. NXGEN offers a wide range of merchant services ranging from online credit card processing solutions to touch screen mobile processing terminals. The best part is, they pair you with a real agent who will look after your credit card processing needs throughout your business lifecycle, keeping you up to date with modern software and equipment, while serving as your go-to support representative when you have questions.