3 time-saving tricks to speed up raising invoices in Xero

 

When we’re talking to people about our Xero Trifecta, we’re always passionately going on about about how Xero can save you time.

We’ve started to create some blog posts that truly practice what we’re preaching, by showing you the practical ways to drastically cut your time from the moment you’re set up in Xero.

Today we’re talking about raising invoices. Find us a business owner who doesn’t want to get their invoices out the door and back in as quickly as possible. You can’t? Of course you can’t!

We all want to get paid! So here’s some little ways you can make the ‘getting paid’ process even more efficient.

 

1. Save ‘inventory items’ even if you’re a services business

You can save yourself a lot of data-entry bother when you send an invoice by simply saving the services you’re regularly selling as items. You do this just the same way you would if you were setting up inventory items to track. And it’s super simple to do:

  • Navigate to Products and Services in your Business menu.
  • Add a new item, and give it a unique code.
  • Enter a description to keep as standard
  • Set a default price (if you want to)
  • Save!

*Extra hack: If you want to upload a whole bunch of items in one go, you can do so by uploading a CSV file. Xero have practically done the work for you by providing a template CSV for you to fill in, which you can find in when you click ‘Import Items’ in your inventory.

 

2. Creating new invoices from copying old ones

Instead of constantly filling out the same kind of information for each invoice, you can simply copy an existing one.

From your list of invoices, open the invoice you wish to copy, and from the “invoice options” dropdown, select copy to. Next, fill out the details of the customer you’re sending to, and save.

This is a useful one to remember if you’re creating similar invoices for different companies that only need slight tweaks.

*Extra hack: You can go through the exact same process to copy a quote!

 

3. Or, let Xero do the hard graft with repeat invoices

If you find you’re copying an invoice to the same company every month, did you know you could set up an invoice to repeat? Instead of entering the same data on the same day over and over again, you can let Xero do the work for you by automating the repeat invoice.

  • Go to Invoices in the Business tab.
  • Create a new repeating invoice by clicking on the Repeating tab.
  • Enter all the information you require
  • Decide when and how often you want your invoice to be created

*Extra hack: You can also set up invoice reminders so that you can remind your customers and clients that a payment is coming up, or to chase payments that are overdue.

Just jump to the Awaiting Payment tab in Invoices and turn invoice reminders on. Here you can edit the default reminders or add your own. Another automation win!

Keep checking out our blog for more technology tips and tricks. We’ll be talking about Xero and the apps that connect with it too, but if there’s something you’re desperate to know that we haven’t covered yet, head over to our Xero Training page. We have plenty of tutorials and you can always book a demo with one of the team.