If you’ve started up a freelance business in your spare time and outside your regular office hours or launched a small business that you’re working to get off the ground before stepping out from the safety net, it’s just as important for this ‘side hustle’ to establish solid invoicing and accounting practices from Day 1.
What is invoicing & accounting software for a side hustle?
As a ‘Sidepreneur’, you likely often find yourself juggling between your day-job and your self-employment. Two jobs can sometimes mean double the stress (and starting a business is a challenge already!), and a heavy burden as far as time-management.
But we believe that invoicing and accounting software should make this much more manageable. Good software should be so simple and fast that:
- You can create and send an invoice in less than a minute
- You can get an overview of your business finances with just a glance
- You don’t waste any time in your invoicing
- You can stay on top of your accounts from anywhere, at any time
Create invoices with invoice software
The most important function of your invoicing software that will help save you the most time is, you guessed it: invoicing. This process should be streamlined and as straightforward as possible, making it easy and fast to raise an invoice.
A good invoicing software for your side hustle should offer the following functions:
- Easy creation of professional, legal invoices
- Various customisable invoice design options
- Automated calculation on invoice templates
- Converting quotations to invoices with just a click
- Easy customer and product management
- Online payment options on your invoices
- Send invoices direct to customers with a click
- Bookkeeping options that are easy and intuitive
Once you’ve created and sent your invoices, the next crucial part of invoicing is the management of those invoices. This is a bit more than basic organisation, it means keeping track of which invoices have been paid, matching payments, following up on payments that are overdue and more.
Invoicing software makes all of these important tasks easy by providing an invoice list that is searchable and can also be filtered to view only unpaid invoices, for example. It also allows:
- Automatic matching of payments to invoices
- Entering payment on invoices
- Reminder letters for overdue payments
And what exactly does ‘automatic matching of payments to invoices’ mean? It means that either when you upload a bank statement or if you receive a payment through an online payment solution, the software automatically matches each payment with the corresponding invoice or expense.
As a sidepreneur, you likely don’t have the time to sit and deal with added time spent on quotes or other documents that often come along with the sales and invoicing process.
How can accounting & invoicing software help?
Good invoicing software should, therefore, provide you with a few more useful tools to help you stay on top of things and make sure that your side hustle is running smoothly. Some added features that can do so include:
- Creating and sending professional-looking quotations
- Marking quotations as accepted
- Converting the quotation to an invoice with just a click
- Generate a delivery note directly from an invoice
- Automatically mark the invoice as ‘Paid’
- Issue reminders in moments
Invoicing software aims to make your workflow more efficient, easier to manage, as well as providing you with useful tools to help you better communicate with your customers.
Bookkeeping for your side hustle
With invoicing and running a business inevitably comes the other side of things - expenses. The accounting aspect of a company can seem tedious and financially technical. But what if that could be simplified as well?
Invoicing and accounting software for sidepreneurs should therefore give you simple, useful ways to manage your business finances, such as:
- Adding and categorising expenses
- Generating financial reports such as VAT, balance sheet and profit & loss
- Maintain a financial overview
- Invite your accountant to collaborate on your account
- Easily export your data
In short, a good invoicing and accounting programme should provide you with all-around solutions to make it faster and easier to manage your business, whether it’s a side hustle or takes 110% of your time.
