Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with invoice

Invoices and consumer rights

Neale — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:43:36 -0800

IANALFilter: What legal rights does having an invoice grant a buyer? If a buyer has a invoice that has all the things an invoice should have - order number, items, quantities, prices, payment method, etc - is the seller obliged to honour the invoice at that price? Or can the seller 'retract' the sale?

You know my name, now gimme my money!

Wavelet — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:24:26 -0800

Freelance writing: how to indicate that you would like compensation for your work after an article has been accepted? I'm new to this freelance writing stuff. As luck would have it, the first article I wrote and submitted was accepted for publication - this is to a large and popular website (within the limited field that I'm interested in writing for). However, although the editor's email was very positive, and they want to make it a feature article, there was no mention of pay.

This is a well trafficked site with a number of big name professional writers (again, within the aforementioned limited field) writing for them, who I assume are not working for free. The article submission guidelines did not mention compensation one way or the other. So, uh...how do I hint that I would like money? If worst comes to worst, this is a wonderful clip to have for my portfolio, but my primary interest in freelance writing was to generate some scratch.

Paypalfilter please help me!

spacefire — Fri, 22 May 2009 17:16:22 -0800

How do I send someone a Paypal subscription invoice? I need to send someone a link via email where they can set up a recurring payment to my paypal account. I can't figure out how to do this! Please help....

setting up a bank account for a small business

bingo — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 15:49:27 -0800

Help me make sure I am setting things up properly dealing with invoices and checking accounts as a small business. I know that my prospective clients won't pay anyone without either a SSN or an EIN number. So I went online and filed with the IRS as a legal partnership (with myself) and got an EIN number under the name of my business-to-be.

Now, my plan is to use that EIN number to invoice my client, and have them make out a check to the name of my new company. Then I will take that check and the IRS document giving my EIN number to the bank, and will tell them that I want to open a business checking account under the company name. Then I will use that checking account to pay myself and anyone else who works with me.

Is this a sensible plan, as far as it goes, or am I missing something? Will the bank accept the check and the IRS document as sufficient documentation to open the account? (I can supply my own ID too, of course, but I want the account to have the company's name, not mine...though I should of course be listed as the person authorized to use the account.)

Looking forward to thoughts/advice, and happy to share more info as needed.

How to automatically track member renewal notices and payments?

jcmilton — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 14:57:51 -0800

I manage an organization with a few hundred members, each of which pays an annual membership fee. Is there a way to automate renewal notices and payments? The membership fees are staggered throughout the year, based on when the member joined the group. Currently, I'm managing things with a combination of manually tracking members on a spreadsheet, manually sending out email reminders and Google Checkout email invoices, and manually recording on the spreadsheet who's up to date on their annual fee and who's behind.

I'm looking for an automated web-based service or off-the-shelf program that can automatically send out email renewal notices based on a date and track the receipt of payment (Google checkout) so as to keep the list of paid and delinquent members up-to-date. Ideally I'm looking for as much of a hands-off solution as possible where all I have to do is monitor a report to see who hasn't renewed yet.

I could manage a small monthly subscription charge or a one-time software purchase, but a custom programming solution is probably not in the budget. Ideas?

Doing the books

adamrice — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 15:56:29 -0800

Please suggest a job-tracking/invoicing application for freelance services. Either Mac-based or Web-based. I have a bunch of persnickety requirements. I've looked at a lot (a looot) of Mac-based apps, but perhaps I've overlooked the magic bullet.

My requirements:
- Must support multiple currencies. Some clients I bill in US$, some in ¥, and I want to leave the door open for € and whatever. This seems to be the most common dealbreaker.
- Must support various billing units. None of my work is billed by time. Some by the word, some by the character, etc. Time-oriented features are useless and time-oriented billing is frustrating.
- Should support a fair amount of customization in invoice formatting.
- Lets me keep track of payment status, earnings over time, that sort of thing.
- Can export data into some kind of interchange format.

During 2008, I've been making do with a Numbers spreadsheet that seems to have gotten too big for the application to digest. Before that, my system was even worse. iBiz would be just about perfect, but it can only handle one currency last time I checked.

How do I get a deadbeat client to pay their invoice?

zzztimbo — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 14:29:00 -0800

Company still hasn't paid my invoice, what recourse do I have? I worked for a small startup as a software engineer for about a month's time. One day they decide to tell all of its employees that they will shut down for a week because of financial difficulties.

The company is open again but with about a 75% reduction in head count. They are now not paying my invoice for the work that I did before the shut down.

What can I do? Some one told me to file a complaint with the labor board. How do I go about doing this? What is the best way get remunerated for my time and energy spent doing work for them?

Also, I'm assuming the reduction in workforce has left a lot of empty Aeron chairs and computers. Should I asked to be paid in chairs and computers instead? I could use a new Mac right about now.

A modest proposal

Sophie1 — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 07:22:37 -0800

I designed a couple of websites just because I know how and now someone wants to pay me to do exactly what I did for free. She wants a proposal and I have no idea what to ask, how to write up a proposal or even a one sheet invoice. Anyone out here have experience with this? I could use sample invoices etc. if anyone knows where to find these. I searched but couldn't find anything to meet my needs.

Thanks!

Invoice? Receipt? Help me bill my client properly.

Null Pointer and the Exceptions — Tue, 06 May 2008 17:14:07 -0800

I offered a client a preferred rate for a block of hours and they agreed, so I sent an invoice. Things went great and now they want more, how do I arrange this on paper? Here's the short and simple:
- A client asked me if they could get a preferred hourly rate if they booked a certain number of hours at a time (40 hours)
- I gave them a rate, they accepted, so I sent them an invoice for 40 hours
- They have now used used up those 40 hours, so what do I send the client?

Do I send them a receipt detailing how the hours were spent? Do I resend them the original invoice, or maybe create a new one? Collection is not the issue as they are paying on time. I just want to make clear that the 40 hrs have been spent, how they were spent, and provide whatever is necessary so they can start using the next block of 40 hours.

I'm new to this so any suggestions are appreciated. Oh, this is software dev related if it matters at all.

Do invoices have to be included in shipments?

DarlingBri — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 10:29:06 -0800

Are there legal requirements for sellers to include an invoice in a shipment to a customer? I'm in the middle of writing a guide for online retailers - the small, independent kind, not the big incorporated online giant kind. These are mostly WAHMs, artisans and casual crafters. Think casual Ebay sellers, for example.

Having ordered from The Ladies several times, I can tell you that it is a very rare event when one of them includes an invoice with the item when it is shipped. I have absolutely no problem with this; I know what I ordered, I am keen to save trees, and in the event of a rare mistake, we both have a record of the original order online.

My question, however, is if this is legally compliant with any regulations that may be in place. Is there a postal requirement or even specific state requirements for invoices to be included in items shipped after purchase?

If it makes any difference:

* They are unlikely to be any kind of incorporated or legally created entity or business;
* Payment is highly likely to have taken place via PayPal;
* Shipments are usually state to state and less usually, international.

I'm not looking for best practice here - I know why invoices are good. and if I need one for a business expense, I just print it off of PayPal.

I'd just like to be able to give The Ladies a heads up if there is, in fact, a requirement to include an invoice in their shipments.

What to charge for a 3 minute throwaway web edit?

Karmakaze — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 12:12:58 -0800

What do I charge for a 3 minute throwaway web edit, and how do I carefully extricate myself from any expectations that may have caused? A few days ago a friend of mine called me, saying one of his clients is completely web illiterate and needed some kind of web design help. I told him I couldn't do much advanced work, but promised to contact the client to see what he needed.

A couple of emails later, I determined that all they needed was a name of an ex-employee taken off the contact and about pages. They just had no idea how to go about that. I said I'd take a look (I didn't know exactly what their setup was at that point.)

When I did a quick ftp, I saw the site was just six static asp pages and it took all of three minutes to make the change. I got a note back from the contact saying "Thank you very much for taking care of this matter so quickly. Please e-mail us an invoice so that we may pay you for your services. In the future we plan on doing more changes in this website & another site my boss has. Would you be interested in handling these changes for us?"

I am absolutely not interested in having to mess with an inherited web design (I'm such an amateur that I still do most of my web design in notepad!). While I wouldn't mind the occasional text tweak like the one I just did, I suspect that the requests would rapidly exceed my skill level and it's probably best not to get any more involved.

So...
- How much should I invoice for?
- What does an invoice like that look like anyway?
- Do I have him mail me a check or something?
- What's the best way of saying "You need to hire (and pay for) a real designer for what you have in mind."?

What to do when the GST is too big for you?

Jimbob — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 23:26:17 -0800

Registering for the GST in Australia for a small consulting job; do we have to? What if we don't? I've managed to get my wife a bit of work doing data entry and management...as a private contractor. We're all new to this. She's got herself an ABN number. The people paying her want her to submit invoices for her payments, and (as you would expect) include the GST amount on there.

However, looking at the Australian Tax Office website, it says that only businesses earning more than $75,000 a year need to register for the GST. This contract isn't worth nearly that much, so it would seem we don't need to register for the GST. Furthermore, as she won't be purchasing anything from suppliers and won't need to claim GST credits, it also seems registration for the GST isn't necessary.

But if we don't register... what happens to the 10% GST we put on our invoices? Do we still collect that and pay it to the tax office? Do we not include it on our invoices as we're not registered? Surely submitting an invoice without the GST component will confuse the hell out of the accountants on the other end.

The ATO website makes none of this clear; they tell you when you should register for the GST, and how to submit activity statements and make payments if you have...their website isn't at all helpful about what to do if you're too small to even register for GST.

Any Aussie Metafiltarians have any ideas?

Seeking invoice generator

beagle — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 11:04:32 -0800

I would like to generate a couple of thousand invoices per week, using a data file with either fixed-width or tab-delimited fields. The output should preferably be PDF. Is there a standard program out there, that will run on a PC, that would allow me to create a format for the invoice, with logo heading, etc., defining exactly where all the fields in the input file should go on the page (and possibly doing some calculation in the process, like generating a due date from a transaction date) -- and then let me run through the input file and create all the invoices? Similar to an MSWord MailMerge, but with PDF output. The program should generate USPS bar codes for ZIP+4 addresses. I'm looking for a somewhat non-standard invoice format, so some flexibility in the output design would be a good thing. In the end there should also be a function to print all generated invoices (ideally in ZIP-code order even if the input file is not). I do not need any other financial functions like accounts receivable management as part of this.

Don't call again

valleys — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 07:38:49 -0800

How do I make phone scam company stop harassing us? Back in the summer a new employee fell for a phone scam. Brief info: somebody called asking to confirm what model of printer we use. No mention of placing orders. Shortly after a box arrived with unrequested paper and printer ribbons and an invoice for over $200 (real value would be less than $50). After several phone calls to what turns out to be a fake company we realised we'd been scammed.

We're in Ontario, so called the RCMP Phonebusters hotline. They told us to send a letter stating our reasons for not accepting the products and giving them 30 days to collect the product or we would discard it. We did this. All was quiet for most of the fall, apart from the occasional copy of the invoice with increasing threats to involve their legal department.

The last 2 weeks they've called 1-2 times each day, sometimes threatening, other times trying to be reasonable. Per Phonebusters advice I just state that we will not pay and hang up.

How can I make them go away and stop calling us?

Phonebusters says they'll give up eventually (and I'm quite amazed personally at how much effort they're putting into this scam, but I'm not about to give in and pay the thing). They also suggest telling the scammers that we'll take them to small claims court for harrassment and time wasted. I haven't done this yet. Any other ideas?

Invoices for Artists?

schwap23 — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 20:13:35 -0800

How to Invoice? Particularly for a physical product that may change structure as part of construction. Yes, there is I've got a gig to build some decorative elements for a coffee bar, and I'm being asked to give them drawings and an invoice by this coming Monday. Drawings are no problem, particularly as I have had extensive discussions with my contact and she seems clear on what the company is buying. However, the nature of what I am making (a sculptural thing) means that it is very difficult to be precise about what the final product will be. It will fit certain dimensions, the primary material will be about 200 coffee cups, but beyond that, it's pretty much up in the air. My question: is there something I should put in my invoice or contract to make sure that everyone comes out happy? I've done this kind of work before with no problems, but I've never done it for a place that wanted formal invoicing and such. Will the forms I can buy at Random Office Store be sufficient, or do I need something spiffier?

Looking for freelance computer tech support software

nitsuj — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 11:24:09 -0800

Is there a good piece of software (either for WindowsXP, or web based) specifically used for tracking customers, invoices, and jobs for someone doing freelance computer tech support? I've seen quite a few other threads here (and elsewhere) about various customer management softwares, but nothing this particular. Various google searches yield mixed results. Does something like this exist?

I'd prefer something free, of course - but I'd be willing to pay for the perfect solution, if it's out there.

Thanks!

Simple, cheap invoice system needed

wordwhiz — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 14:52:57 -0800

Can anyone suggest a simple, cheap invoicing software for a one-person service biz like mine? Nothing fancy, please. I just need it to track invoices, aging and payments. Most important: it has to be simple enough that even a financial doofus like me can use it.

OSX app to log phone calls w/ datestamp from my stock G4 modem?

Wild_Eep — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 07:26:01 -0800

I need an OSX app that will make use of my G4s internal modem to receive caller ID information and log the time of the call. Using a standard G4 modem (which I don't believe is a 'voice' modem, but I could be wrong), is there a way to record who calls came from and when they happened? Bonus points for recording the duration of a call. Super-mega-bonus points if it can integrate into a billing/invoicing system. Cheaper is better. Here's my rig.

Online Quotation system.

wibbler — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 01:58:34 -0800

I'm looking for an online product quotation system that I can host on my domain. I need it to accomodate UK currency, be able to cope with 4 price levels from a list of products and have customisable fields. And I don't mind paying a bit. Is it too much to ask?! Googling seems to suggest it is...