Get Shift Done: Tips and Tricks

Set It and Forget It: FreshBook’s Recurring Invoices Take the Hassle Out of Getting Paid

If you use FreshBooks, you now have a way of cutting out one of the most repetitive tasks associated with getting paid — sending out invoices for recurring work.

That’s right, all you need to do is create one recurring invoice and FreshBooks will send it out as many times and as often as you choose. Here’s how it works:

From your Invoices tab, choose the Recurring submenu and create a new profile. You’ll need a new profile for each separate invoice you want to send, which likely means one per client at least:

The next screen that pops up is almost a carbon copy of the one you use to create individual invoices.

In this case however, you’ll use the “Schedule” feature to automate your invoices. You can schedule an invoice to send on a certain day, at a certain interval, for as long or short a period as you want.

(Pro tip: even one-time invoices can be scheduled in advance by setting the “How Many” field to “1”.)

For example, let’s say I have a six-month retainer contract with Client X that pays me the same amount of money each month. Rather than log into FreshBooks six times to create identical invoices, I can set the number of recurrences to six right up front and then forget about it.

To automatically customize an invoice, you can use dynamic variables such as :month:, :year:, and :quarter: that will include the correct information each time your invoice sends.

While this tip works best when you have the same line items and rates every month, you can have FreshBooks automatically pull in accumulated hourly tasks and items using the “Include Unbilled Time and Expenses” feature:

To use this feature, you’ll need to make sure you have assigned standard rates to your hourly tasks and a cost to every item you plan to bill for:

That’s it! Now you can just focus on your work and rest assured that FreshBooks has the invoicing covered.

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