Blinksale tip
July 21, 2006
When I became an independent contractor, for the first time I needed to send invoices on a regular basis. My previous method, for the occasional freelance job, of whipping them up in Illustrator and then saving them as a folder of PDFs was clearly not going to cut it when I’m sending them out every few days. That’s when I found out about Firewheel Design’s Blinksale. It’s cheap (or free!), does exactly what I need, and has a very user-friendly interface. The fact that the default templates don’t suck is a nice added bonus. Clients get HTML-styled or text-formatted emails, along with links to the invoice on Blinksale’s web site. It’s all much easier than mailing out PDFs, not to mention its ability to track and tag invoices and send out thank-you notes upon receipt of payment. (It also shows how much I’ve invoiced this year, an exercise that’s a little more fun for me every time I look at it).
This isn’t just my review of Blinksale, though—I also wanted to point out a handy hidden function that doesn’t seem to be in the documentation, in hopes that maybe somebody will google the right terms and find this site. One of my clients included a slight overpayment in their last check, and I wanted to go ahead and enter a credit to remind myself to deduct it from their next invoice. After futzing with the documentation for a bit, I decided to try the simplest thing—create a new invoice, and enter a dollar amount of $-20.00. It worked flawlessly, I noted the line as a “Credit,” and saved the draft invoice for a later date.
Update: As Brandon pointed out, your invoice can’t have a negative total. To work around this, first enter all of your regular invoice items, then enter the credit as the last line. If you’re just entering the credit on an invoice you’ll complete later (as I did), first enter a “placeholder” amount greater than the credit. For example: I entered a “Placeholder” charge for $30, then entered the credit of $-20.00.
This kind of thing is indicative of what I love about the service (and the best web apps in general)—when little things just work the way you’d guess that they might.
So, that’s giving a credit with Blinksale. And if you haven’t, give it a whirl and start invoicing the fun way.
