I love working on different digital media projects especially, Graphic Design. I landed a freelance project recently and was very happy about it, until I realised I had to send my client an Invoice for my services. Being new to the city and the country, I did not know any rules or a way to send an Invoice. The confusion and dilemma of wanting to work but not wanting to let your client know that you are still new to the market and do not know a proper way to send out Invoices was stressful. But, I got lucky as that was the time when I started having Entrepreneurship classes in my program. My professor introduced me to Wave Accounting. I’m not going to say it changed my life and I can’t live without it now, but being a design student, I never even knew this kind of services were available for all kinds of businesses. So here is what I have learnt so far:
Wave accounting is free accounting software for small businesses, especially good for freelancers or in a more formal way of saying – the sole proprietors or consultants. When my professor gave us a lesson on it, I was surprised to find that it is a Canadian company and that it was just a few blocks away from my school. This information made me more intrigued to see the software. The signing up process is easy and fast. The best thing? It lets me customize and add my company name, address, logo and even lets me choose an Invoice layout. The company information automatically appears in all the Invoices, Bills and Reports. The interface of this software is very easy to use. There is a dashboard where we can see a condensed version of our finances and other accounting tasks. It was so easy to make an Invoice.
I got to choose the layout and customize my invoice, which other softwares do not offer.
The next step is add the details like customer name and address, date and the services you are charging along with the amount. It is very essential to add address of the client, the proper date of the invoice along with the payment due date and a short description of what the service was; this helps maintain the records in a much cleaner way and helps you sort out the tax filing mush faster.
Then you send the invoice or we can even download and send manually. We can even link our bank account and give an option to pay by credit card to the client, which saves a lot of time for both the service provider and the client.
The best thing about wave is that I can keep track of my income and expenses. We can also add income tax and keep track of it as well. I can know how much money is payable to me in the coming months and also to keep track of the bills due.
Wave accounting is the ultimate accounting software for small companies or individuals who don’t like their numbers. It makes it easy to manage and understand accounts. I’m really grateful we have the resources and technology to make such kind of softwares possible.
