Invoices

I have less to say about invoices than I did about income-tracking spreadsheets, but I did re-design my invoice template this year, and since I'm reasonably happy with it I figured I might as well share that here as well:

This is pretty straightforward, I think. I just update the INVOICE NO. and DATE as well as the other fields:

TO:/ORDERED BY:

"To" is the person who receives the invoice. "Ordered By" is the art director or other person I've been working with on the actual job. Sometimes they are the same person, but if they aren't, it's good to include my contact's name in case anyone in the billing department wonders who the hell I am.

DESCRIPTION:

As much info as I can include about the specifics of the job. If the client has an official description or purchase order number, that goes here as well.

ADDITIONAL EXPENSES:

Usually "none," but occasionally I have to charge for excessive revisions, kill fees, and so on.

TOTAL COST:

The most important part! I write this number in a bigger font size than anything else on the page, so it's easy to see. I have that thing about "Due within 30 days" on there to protect myself, but I'm not a big stickler about it. I've been lucky enough to have pretty good clients but if I ever have to go after a deadbeat this will come in handy.

My contact info and Tax ID stay the same, so they're a permanent part of the template (background) layer in Photoshop.  (I used to have a crappy old Word document, but it was ugly, featured design elements from an outdated version of my site, and probably didn't even look the same on all my clients' computers.) Once everything is updated, I save the file first as a .PSD and then a flattened .PDF, which I email to the client.

A note about color: When designing this invoice, I tried to consider the needs of the clients who would be using it. Since I send it electronically, I was tempted to go full-color, with a bright background and all sorts of other details, but for all I know, some of my clients may need to print off hard copies and would resent the drain on their printer ink. Instead, I settled on the more conservative version above, which should work well even if printed out in grayscale.

Record-keeping

As the year draws to a close, I thought I'd talk about something you don't hear too much about in the illustration world: paperwork!

When I started working steadily, I realized I needed a system to keep track of my various assignments, income, expenses, and so on. For a while, I just scrawled everything in a notebook and stuffed all my receipts into an envelope only to sort them out at tax time, but eventually I streamlined the process into something that works much better. I now keep simple spreadsheets to track my expenses and income.

The "income" one is far more interesting, and I refine it every year, to better suit my needs as my career grows. Here's a screenshot as well as a breakdown of what I put in each column, and why:

All the specifics (dates, clients, fees, etc.) are made-up, so don't read too much into them

ASSIGNED:
This is the date the job came in. Handy if I need to comb through emails to find details or particulars about the assignment at a later date.

SKETCHES:
New for 2015. I used to be able to keep this kind of stuff straight in my head, but as I get more work, it's hard for me to remember overlapping deadlines. The plan for this year is to write the date sketches are due in this box, then replace it with the date they were actually turned in as I submit them.

FINAL ART:
Same basic idea as "SKETCHES" above.

INVOICED:
This is the date on which I submitted an invoice. Depending on the client, I might hear right away that my final art was approved, and I can invoice on the same day. Other times, though, the art director needs to present my art to editors and other staff, and by the time they all approve it, sometimes the word doesn't get back to me. If I haven't heard anything in about a week, I check in with my contact and make sure it's okay to invoice.

CLIENT:
Self-explanatory: for whom I did the job. Right now I'm still using pretty broad descriptions of these, but as I do multiple jobs for different departments/publications at the same parent company, I may have to be more specific in the future.

INVOICE #:
My friend, the illustrator Mark Zingarelli, once suggested starting these with an arbitrarily high number, so it wouldn't look like my first couple invoices were my first couple jobs. That has worked out well!

DATE PAID:
The date the check arrives. This is more for my own reference (keeping track of the time between invoicing and getting paid) than anything else. For tax purposes, it's more important to know when I've actually deposited the check, but that's only an issue at the very end/beginning of the year.

AMOUNT:
How much I got paid. This automatically gets totalled up at the bottom so I don't screw up the math doing it myself.

DESCRIPTION:
Everything else I want to note about the job. Usually a sparse description is sufficient, but if a client has a purchase order number or submission ID they want noted on the invoice, I jot that down here too.


The color-coding is kind of a new element as well, to help me keep things straight when I'm working on several jobs at once. The jobs that are in white are completed, while the ones highlighted in yellow still require something else from me, whether it's sketches, final art, or just writing up the invoice. Also I use a different color scheme overall from year-to-year so I don't accidentally open up the current year's records when doing the previous year's taxes, and so on.


Anyway, I hope that wasn't too boring! I know when I was starting out it was hard to find this kind of information so I thought I would share my method in case it helps any newer artists out there. Let me know what you think!