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.
Hey. This is a good tip, but I can’t seem to get it to work. When I try saving the invoice it tells me that the invoice total cannot be negative. You don’t get that error?
I did, actually and I should have mentioned that. I’ll update the instructions to reflect how I got around that error.
Ok, thanks for the work-around. I wonder why invoices are restricted to positive totals only? It seems that processing a credit and emailing the client a written invoice with the total credit amount would be a fairly standard concept (separate from overpayment even). At any rate, this could help me in the future, so thanks.
Nice find. The lack of sleep prevented me from getting exactly what you were saying right off the bat, but after some futzing around myself, I figured out what you were talking about by just editing a previous invoice I’ve already made, and added a new line with a -$20.00 to it. That way I wouldnt have to use up a invoice credit to test your tip. Good stuff though man, good stuff.
By the way, I sometimes wonder how people reached my site from time to time (Regardless of having mint installed), so I thought I’d let you know.
Tips & Tricks
But being the up and coming guy you are, I’m sure you already know this.
P.S. Interesting about page man, ;) good read actually.