I know what you're thinking -- how am I supposed to get paid without an invoice?! But don't fret, you will get paid, but just with less effort on your part! You don't actually need to deal with spreadsheets, templates, or printers to send an invoice to a client. Let's explore why this traditional approach is more trouble than it's worth and how modern solutions can simplify your life.
The Pitfalls of Manual Invoicing
Creating invoices manually is like trying to write a symphony with a quill and ink when you could be reaching for Sibelius or MuseScore. It's cumbersome, time-consuming, and prone to errors. Each minute you spend formatting an invoice or tracking payments is a minute taken away from your music. Plus, manual invoicing can lead to mistakes in amounts, missed payments, followup calls and emails, and otherwise disorganized financial records. And trust me, I know that every minute and every dollar counts when you're doing the grind.
Fortunately, there are tons of ways for you to get paid for your work without worrying so much about formatting and sending every invoice manually. Automated invoicing platforms like Invoicely and Stripe will allow you to streamline and automate the process of sending invoices and getting paid for your services. And really, the only reason you want to send invoices is to get paid anyway, so it probably makes sense to get it done as efficiently as possible.
Invoicely
Invoicely is a free, simple, and secure invoicing solution tailored for small businesses, so it's perfect for musicians. Here's an overview of what Invoicely offers:
Key features
- Online Payments: Invoicely supports accepting credit card payments and integrates with multiple payment gateways (like Stripe, which I go into more details about below). This flexibility allows clients to make payments directly from the invoice, even on mobile devices, ensuring convenience and efficiency
- Time, Expense, and Mileage Tracking: It offers features to track hourly billed tasks, expenses, and trips. These can be effortlessly converted into invoices or estimates, streamlining the billing process
- Automated Recurring Invoices: The platform allows for the creation of recurring invoices and sends automatic payment reminders, simplifying your cash flow management
- Customization and Branding: Invoicely enables users to fully customize statements, logos, icons, control panel pages, and login screens, allowing businesses to maintain brand consistency across their invoicing and communication
- Business Reports and Summaries: The platform provides a suite of customizable business reports and summaries, offering insights into your overall financial situation
Pricing plans
Invoicely offers a free plan, as well as paid plans for when you want to customize branding or send more invoices. But you probably won't need anything more than the basic plan as a single musician or band:
- Free Plan: This plan includes 5 monthly invoices, 3 saved clients, and limited branding options.
- Basic Plan ($9.99/month): Offers 100 monthly invoices, 25 saved clients, up to 2 team members, and includes features like time, expense, and mileage tracking.
- Professional Plan ($19.99/month): This plan provides 250 monthly invoices, 100 saved clients, up to 10 team members, and all features of the Basic Plan.
- Enterprise Plan ($29.99/month): Offers unlimited monthly invoices and saved clients, up to 25 team members, and includes all features available in the Professional Plan
Stripe
If you want to get one level higher, you can leverage the invoicing functionality of Stripe. Stripe is an online payments provider that facilitates both invoices and automatic billing via subscriptions.
Key features
- Accept a variety of payment methods: You can enable a huge variety of payment methods, including credit card, cash app, apple pay, google pay, bank transfer, and more.
- Automatic Reminders: Sending pre-built emails to customers for missed or overdue payments
- Customer Portal: Allowing customers to manage their billing details on a secure, Stripe-hosted page
- Invoice Auto-Reconciliation: Automatically reconciles invoices paid by ACH credit or wire transfers
- Smart Retries: Utilizing machine learning to optimize retrying failed payments
- Financial reporting: Your Stripe dashboard will give you an overall picture of your payment history
Integrations through the Stripe app marketplace
Since Stripe is such a developer-friendly platform, there are also tons of integrations available for other tools that you might already be using like Quickbooks, Freshbooks, Mailchimp, and more. You can find these in the Stripe app marketplace.
Pricing
There are no recurring or up-front costs associated with Stripe. Instead, you'll pay a percentage of each invoice and payment that is collected.
- Base price: 2.9% + 30c per successful card charge
- Invoices price: 0.4% per paid invoice
Bonus feature: In-person payments
You're probably used to using something like Square to collect in-person payments at shows. Well, you can do the same thing with Stripe! You can use Stripe Terminal to collect in-person payments, meaning that you can centralize all of your payments into a single platform.
The Advantages of digital invoicing
Embracing digital invoicing platforms like Invoicely and Stripe means you're choosing efficiency, accuracy, and professionalism. These tools save you time and hassle, reduce the risk of errors, and provide a clear overview of your financial health. This way, you can focus more on your music and less on the mundane tasks of managing finances.
There are obviously way more tools out that there you can find if you start looking for automated invoicing software, but these are the two that I'm most familiar with, have used myself, and recommend to others.
In fact, we use Stripe as the financial infrastructure here at CodaCal! This makes it dead-simple for the music teachers on our platform to set up automated payments for their student lessons, and to give their students/clients a dedicated payments portal to manage their stored payment methods and view past invoices.
Anyway, I hope you get some use out of this. The unofficial motto here at CodaCal is "ditch the spreadsheets," and I think we could probably extend that to "ditch the manual invoices," too. Happy gigging!
Bonus videos for music teachers
Are you also a music teacher, or know any music teachers? You might be interested in checking out our 4-video series all about automating and managing a private teaching studio.