When I started working as a freelancer in IT, a few years ago, what I didn’t take into account in the begining was the fact that I will have to bill my clients regularly and that I never prepared an invoice before in my life, as I never had to.

I remember that at first Upwork, was a good solution as it was billing my clients automatically, directly through the platform. However, what about the extra clients that I found outside of the platform? How will I bill them?

How to easily make your first invoice

What my accountant suggested at first was to create the invoices in an excel. However, this was not a great idea in my opinion, as it looked very unprofessional.

What I did instead was to just look on google for a free invoice software. This way I found https://invoice-generator.com/ which was a easy to use software and the final result was a PDF file, which looked much better than a csv file.

The software from above it’s free to use, quite simple (in my opinion) and gives a good result. It’s a really useful tool for someone who only invoices a few clients per month.

However, what I didn’t necessary loved about this tool, was that it was not saving my data. I would like a software where some of the fields of the invoice will come prefilled based on some settings that you make. Fields like your company’s name, tax number, bank account and so on.

This way the process will be smother and faster, and in the end it will save time.

When I created BillTime.io, I knew that I want to make a tool that will fullfill all my billing needs and that’s when I created my own invoice maker, where I made these fields that I was talking about earlier, to be settings for the user’s organization, and when someone accesses the invoice maker, this info to be prefilled. I also procedeed by having some fields that can be easily filled for the clients added in the platform.

I’m sure there are a lot of other solutions, some paid, some for free that can solve this problem. Feel free to leave a comment with what solution you use, and if you would recommend it or not.