'Richard Evans knows his subject inside out'.
Susan Elkin, The Stage, 2014
During your freelance career, invoices will be required in order to get paid for work you have done. If you are a performer and have an agent, they will do this for you and chase payments on your behalf, as that is part of their job, for which you pay them commission on the money you earn. However, there may be times in your career when you are unrepresented and don't have an agent to do this, or need to send invoices for other freelance work you've done, perhaps to pay the bills when not working in your chosen profession.
Many companies will not pay you until you send them an invoice (a producer told me recently that their company was still waiting to pay two freelancers, who hadn't yet sent invoices for work that was finished over a year before). A lot of time is also wasted by administrators and accountants, because the invoices that have been sent are incomplete or don't contain the necessary or correct information, so they therefore have to be returned and resubmitted.
So let's look at what information you must and can include in an invoice. The two types of invoice included here are the most common. The first is when you have agreed a fee for a job or project and the second is when you're charging for hours, days or sessions that you have worked. To help you, there are links to both templates in Microsoft Word format below, that you can edit and adapt, deleting the items that don't apply to you, before saving the document and sending it to your clients.
CLICK HERE to download the template in MS Word for when you have agreed a fee for a job
CLICK HERE to download the template in MS Word for when you are being paid an hourly, daily or weekly rate for a job
These MS Word documents are formatted for A4 page size, so they may appear jumbled up on smaller screens, such as phones. You may also have to realign the text if you add or take out information from the templates.
It is usually acceptable to send your invoice with receipts for expenses, timesheets and other evidence by email as attachments, though some companies might insist on hard copies of these being sent by post, so make sure you check beforehand.
ESSENTIAL INFORMATION TO INCLUDE (you'll see all of these items in order on the templates)
You may also be asked to provide these details (or you could include them anyway, to be on the safe side)
As you can see, invoicing isn't a difficult task or as daunting as some people think, so go for it and get any money you are owed rolling in!
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