Bonsai is an excellent tool for invoicing, whether you're an agency, an team or an LLC. Invoices are one of our most popular tools; You can create invoices from scratch, generate them from time you've tracked, or from proposals/contracts - and get paid by your clients quickly and easily.
To learn more about our other tools, visit our getting started article here.
Creating an invoice
To create an invoice, navigate to Invoices and select 'New Invoice':
Note: Although these are the steps to make an invoice "independently", you can also create a contract or a proposal, and choose to make your invoices along with those documents as well.
After this, you will be presented with this prompt. Here you can choose the Invoice Type, such as a single invoice, a recurring or subscription invoice, or a bundled invoice. Then you can choose your Client, and choose an existing project or make a new one.
Now, you can click the green 'Create Invoice' button to get started.
Payment methods
After creating your first invoice, it's a great idea to make sure your payment methods are set up the way you want.
There are two ways of accomplishing this:
After creating an invoice, and while it's still in 'Drafted' status, you can easily edit the payments methods by accessing the "Payments" section in the sidebar.
You can also do this by navigating to 'Invoices' and selecting 'Edit Payment Methods':
For more information on setting up integrated payment methods, check out this article here.
Note: If you are utilizing processors such as Bonsai Payments, Stripe Payments, or Paypal, remember that processing fees will apply depending on your processor and payment method.
You are also able to upload your own custom payment instructions by navigating to Invoices and selecting the 'Settings' tab. From here, you can enable the "Show 'other' payment method option", which will showcase your own offline ways to pay for invoicing.
Invoice options
There are a few useful options to note when creating your invoice.
You will see that the 'Issued On' date and the 'Send Now' options are highlighted. You can change the "issued date" to a future date, and then click on the "calendar" icon next to "Send Now" if you want to schedule the invoice to be sent on a future date. This will make sure that your invoice is sent to your client on that future date.
You can click 'Add Recipient' to add additional contacts, or additional client emails, to your invoice when sending it.
Lastly, you need to create 'Line Items' on your invoice. If you generated this invoice from a proposal or contract, these may already be started for you. Enter an Item Name, type in a quantity for Units, and add the Rate for that item. These will tally and become a total at the bottom of the invoice.
You can also create a custom tax by clicking on where it says '0.0%' and adding your own figure and tax name. You can also add expenses by clicking on 'Add Expenses'.
Sending Your Invoice
When you're finished with your invoice, the highlighted 'Send Now' option is straightforward. Once clicked, it will give you an option to either send your client the invoice through Bonsai, or you can choose to send it as a URL link to your client.
Now that you've sent your invoice, you can always review your invoices from your Invoices page.
The icon on the left-hand side will let you know the status of the invoice:
Draft (Light Grey)
Paid (Green)
Outstanding (Dark Grey)
Overdue (Red)
