Creating an invoice is very easy and there are many ways to create an invoice. You can create an invoice using an invoice template, such as an Excel invoice template, a Microsoft Word invoice template, a PDF invoice template, or simply filling out a pre-printed invoice form. However, all these methods are time consuming because:

• It takes time to figure out how to fill out the forms.
• Its difficult to add all the item costs together and to calculate the sales tax.
• You have to keep track of the items on your invoice.
• You still have to print, address, stuff and stamp the invoice for sending via snail mail.

This is not to mention all the record keeping you’ll have to do such as making copies of your invoice, dating them, and finding places to organize, file and store your invoices.

This is exactly why you should use WorkingPoint free invoicing. With our free invoicing software you get to do all your invoicing online in a very easy manner. Here is why:

• WorkingPoint Invoice forms are easy and clear to fill out
• Invoice totals are automatically calculated, no need to get the calculator
• All your items are stored in our inventory management system
• You can make changes, add and delete items from your invoices easily
• It’s a snap to send invoices via email
• Or turn your invoice into a PDF to send to your customers or keep as a record
• We store your invoices for you in the Amazon EC2 cloud, a safe place for your data
• Free Invoicing means it will cost you absolutely nothing
• Take your invoice with you anywhere. If you have an internet connection, you have a business!

Back in the days of locally installed Invoicing systems like Quickbooks, you had to download and install software to make invoices. With WorkingPoint you do not have to install or set up anything. You can create an invoice for your cleaning business, landscaping business, photography business, real estate or construction business, law firm or web development business or any other profession or consulting firm that requires invoicing.

Invoicing is important because it gets you paid! With WorkingPoint you create professional, custom invoices that will get you paid faster! Try WorkingPoint Now!

In one of my postings last week I suggested that one of the two main reasons for making a profit was to create a cash reserve for solving mistakes. (The other reason, of course, is to improve the value of your company through retained earnings.) I posed the question “why do you need to make a profit?” I pointed out that all small business owners have things they can control, such as what services or products they sell, and things they cannot control, such as the economy, availability of credit, taxation and government compliance, or labor issues. Closing with a request for reader response about which uncontrollable issue was most concerning, I received some interesting comments.

Several small business owners laughed about the mistakes they made on a regular basis – because they were small and inexpensive to correct. When pressed to choose which specific macro issue bothered them most, however, there wasn’t a single answer (although labor issues were not mentioned). Instead, the common theme was that dealing with the economy, credit market, and governmental compliance issues distracted them from their primary purpose – to enjoy doing the work they created their business to do.

That response resonated with me deeply. We start our businesses so that we can dedicate ourselves to doing things we like to do, things we do very well, and things that pay better than our alternatives. Everything else – the things we do because we own the business – constitutes our “second job”.

The folks I heard from are happy to remain in business as long as the time and satisfaction of their primary job exceeds that of their secondary job. That works for me!

Daniel Kehrer of Business.com gave WorkingPoint his top pick in a roundup including all the heavy weights of online, bookkeeping solutions for small businesses. The list includes QuickBooks Online, FreshBooks, Zoho, Outright and Harvest. Here is a bit of what he had to say (Thanks Daniel!):

Here are my top five online invoicing and bookkeeping services for small business:

WorkingPoint.com (previously called NetBooks) aspires to be much more than just online bookkeeping. It’s an end-to-end solution that lets you manage your entire small business online. This includes invoicing, bookkeeping, contact management, expense tracking, financial reports, inventory management and more.

You can read the rest of the article and see why WorkingPoint came out ahead of the pack here.

Recently, a WorkingPoint User posed the following question to me: “Can you please list the top 5 things to remember [when] using the basic program.” I thought, “What a great question!” And I also thought you may want to read my response:

1) It is Free. And it’s Basic.
You may find that you will want to upgrade later to get access to the premium features.

2) Create a Company Profile
This is the easiest way to help market your business (again) for free. A Company Profile is a great way to keep people connected with your business and find you online by helping boost the ability for search engines to find you by leaving a longer digital breadcrumb trail. If you already have a website, add the URL to the Profile and you just boosted the search-ability of your main web site too.

3) Record Your Bills and Expenses Regularly
We don’t usually have to be reminded to create an invoice – heck, it’s how our customers know its time to pay us – but keeping track of our bills and expenses is usually something we put off doing. My advice – manage your bills and expenses as often as is realistic for you and your business schedule.

Keeping up on entering your bills and recording receipts –  for lunches or supplies and other reimbursements – will give better insight into your spending habits by letting you take advantage of the insightful dashboard widgets (like the Expenses to Date chart, the Profit and Loss graph) not to mention Who Do I Owe? and important financial reports like the Income Statement, all of which help you make good decisions for your business.

4) Track Your Inventory in WorkingPoint
If you sell products and keep them in stock, take advantage of the inventory feature in WorkingPoint. It will help you track the average cost of your goods and record the cost of goods sold when you invoice for products automatically. Just remember to add inventory through bills when you purchase products and sell them using the invoice and WorkingPoint will pretty much take care of the rest. Inventory management doesn’t get much easier than this.

5) Get Help When You Need It
If you have a question about what something is or how to do it in WorkingPoint, you may find the answer on the page your using – click a bubble icon to get more info or take a look at the page help.

If you don’t find your answer there, click Help in the upper right-hand corner of your account. There are a lot of great step-by-step instructions there along with some good examples of what things are and how to use them in WorkingPoint.

If you’re still stuck, contact Support and we’ll help you.

And this top 5 is just the tip of the iceberg, I could have gone on and on. Our Basic (Free) plan has a lot more features that make managing a business a breeze. If you are considering WorkingPoint for you company, check out our account plans and see which one fits your needs.

The WorkingPoint Community is made up of small business owners, like yourself, and we want you to get to know each other. We’d like to introduce you to Nicole Baker of Baker’s Paralegal Services:

Baker’s Paralegal Services offers Preparation of Legal Documents & Legal Transcription

Don’t have a profile for your small business? Learn more or Sign up for an account and create your free profile today!

The WorkingPoint Community is made up of small business owners, like yourself, and we want you to get to know each other. We’d like to introduce you to Britt Thompson of Beach Bums Freaky Clean Floors:

Providing Carpet, Tile, balcony and Upholstery cleaning to the condominium rental market in Panama City Beach, FL. In addition, Beach Bums is now offering full departure, and deep cleaning housekeeping services, to individual Owners and rental agencies in the Panama City Beach area.

Don’t have a profile for your small business? Learn more or Sign up for an account and create your free profile today!

Unusually, one of our customers came to visit today. I know what you’re thinking. “What’s the big deal?”

At WorkingPoint, we serve customers around the world via the web.  Of course we have contact with them, but it’s almost always through emails.  Less frequently, we speak with customers on the phone, but only rarely are we given the chance to host a customer in our office. What a treat it was!

We have had several phone conversations with our visitor, Cody Maher of eCopywriters, (who also currently appears on our web site home page) so he’s hardly a stranger to us.  We spent some time understanding how he uses WorkingPoint and what we can do to better serve the needs of his business.

Our Chief Marketing and Product Management folks were also there, and I had two very strong impressions:

1. It was a luxury for us to be able to simply exchange views, face to face.
2. I’m jealous of small business owners, who get to meet their customers on a daily basis. You may envy our “reach,” but please don’t take your direct customer contact for granted.  It’s a luxury.

One more thing; if you’re considering someone to help you with writing for your business – copy of any kind – then get in touch with Cody.  He’s a good guy with a company that does some cool stuff.  http://www.ecopywriters.com/

This is a guest post from: Ryan McKillen, CPA

Recent events at a Microsoft subsidiary called Danger (a prophetic name, as it turns out) serve as a great reminder about the importance of backups. Danger makes a T-Mobile phone called Sidekick and stores phone data on Microsoft’s servers. A recent gaffe prompted Microsoft and Danger to notify customers that their data had been lost. Just today, after a period of limbo and dishing out quite the scare, the companies have announced they are capable of restoring most customer data.

As trusted partners of your small business, we felt this an opportune time to thank you for that trust, and once again, openly address the backup issue. This post contains pragmatic advice for assuring your WorkingPoint and other critical business data is safe.

Is WorkingPoint Data Safe?

Just two months ago, we blogged about Why Data Backup Is So Important. We shared what WorkingPoint point does to keep your data safe:

By using WorkingPoint, your data is continually backed up on our servers located at Amazon’s bank-grade e-commerce facility. We worry about backups for you. You can access your data anywhere confident in the knowledge it will be there when you need it.

We also recommended smart measures to take with all of your service providers:

Should you trust any provider completely with your data? NO! It’s your data. With WorkingPoint you can export your data and save them wherever you feel most comfortable. Just look for the export icons at the top of your Accounts, Contacts and Items List to download a CSV file of your data (or vCard file for Contacts, if you prefer).

3 Principles for Backing Up

For the data that resides on your own computers and servers, please have a backup and restore plan in place. Every business has a unique set of circumstances, but here are 3 principles your plans should encompass:

1. Create backups and create them regularly. Your hardware may fail the next time you return from the coffee pot, or it may be years down the road. When it does, you’ll not only be glad that you have a backup, but a recent one.
2. Keep your backups offsite. In the event that your business is ever the victim of fire or theft, do not keep your primary and backup data in the same place.
3. Test your restore process. There are 3 reasons why merely backing up is not enough: Until you successfully perform a restore, you cannot be certain your backups have integrity. You need the practice and the confidence that if needed, you can quickly get your business back online. Data can be corrupted and all storage media eventually goes bad, so while regularly backing up is smart, so to is restoring.

A Practical Backup Plan

Since I’ve been a small business owner, I’ll close with how to set up the simple backup scheme that I used for my business.

1. Buy two external hard drives.
2. Keep one at your office (onsite backup) and one at home (offsite). If you work from home, keep one at home and one in a safe deposit box where you bank.
3. Set automatic reminders that regularly prompt you to backup.
4. Each time you finish backing up, swap the locations of the external drives. This ensures multiple recent backups, offsite and on.
5. Don’t forget to periodically test restoring!

Now get a good night’s sleep, knowing your WorkingPoint and other critical data is safe.

Many small business people track expenses by tossing receipts in a folder and wait until tax time to organize them. Often they then turn these expense documents over to a tax preparer. This is wrong for several reasons. First, if you don’t track expenses as they are owed you can’t tell how well your business is doing. Also, if you wait until the end of the year to record your expenses you are probably paying too much estimated taxes each quarter.

What are Estimated Quarterly Taxes?

If you are self employed or run a small business and have been doing that for more than a year, chances are that you are required to pay your state and federal income taxes on a quarterly basis. If you earn more than the predefined limit and don’t pay quarterly estimated taxes you will be liable for interest on the unpaid taxes and penalties. This is definitely to be avoided. Pay your estimated taxes by April 15th, June 15th, September 15th, and January 15th by mailing your form 1040es to your IRS service center following the instructions on the form. You can also submit the payments online here. Here is more information from the IRS on estimated taxes.

Further information from the IRS:
IRS Form 1040ES
IRS Publication 505

How can you reduce your Estimated Quarterly Taxes?

You have to report net income (profit) from your business on your estimated quarterly 1040ES form. Net income is income minus expenses, so you can reduce your income by deducting the legitimate business expenses it took to generate that income. By doing this at least quarterly and using that lower amount on your estimated quarterly tax worksheet 1040ES you may be able to reduce the amount of income you are required to pay taxes on. This is true as well if your business is making less income in the current year than the one before. If you have carefully tracked your expenses and income you can run an Income Statement for the quarter in question and use the net income reported there as the net profit for your business. An automated, online, income and expense tracking system like WorkingPoint.com would be perfect for this.

During my conversations with small business owners, profitability is a frequent topic. The majority of owners focus on how to increase the profit of their business and a smaller segment is driven by a “tax-avoidance” strategy.

Let me reframe an earlier question I posed, “how much profit do you need,” to a broader issue: “why do you need to make a profit?”

I’ll skip over the arithmetic part about having enough money to pay your expenses and won’t address the benefits of retained earnings.  Instead, let’s focus on a simple premise: you need money to fix mistakes.

Every CEO/owner makes mistakes.  Successful owners simply make mistakes that are inexpensive to correct. Big mistakes, however, can ruin an enterprise – no matter the size of the company.

As an owner, your job is to think about the “big picture.”   You don’t have the luxury of thinking only about your business operations.  You have to constantly consider your market, your competition, and everything else as well.  You’re human, and you’ll make a mistake or two.  If you’re good – or lucky – the problems you face will require quick and inexpensive responses.  Some issues, however, are global, impact all of us, and have neither fast nor cheap solutions.

One thing is certain:  if you’re not profitable enough, you won’t have the cash and capital reserves you need to address – or even just cope with — the macro issues facing us all.

What concerns you the most?  Is it the economy, the availability of credit, taxation and government compliance, or labor issues?

Drop me a line and let me know!