Virtual assistant billing your clients
This area varies from virtual assistant to virtual assistant and from country to country. As a virtual assistant billing your clients, some prefer to bill weekly, fortnightly or monthly. Some virtual assistants require 50% of the monies up front for new clients or if they are undertaking a huge project. In this regard you are not left completely out of pocket if a new client that you are not familiar with refuses to pay you once you have delivered the work. And some virtual assistants prefer retainers as a form of payment. Either method requires you to bill/invoice your clients. If you want information on rates and retainers
click here I have two parts to my invoicing and billing, the Invoice and the Time Billing Sheet. When billing clients by the hour you really have to keep an up to date detailed list of what services or jobs you performed for that client. This justifies your invoice amount to the client. The client then knows exactly what he is paying you for and he can see how long it took you to perform certain tasks. I personally use Microsoft Publisher to produce my bills, only because I have it on my system already and Publisher has invoice and time billing templates available for your use. You may prefer another system. An invoice that summarises the following on it: . My company details, client details, date, etc. Your country may have specific goods and services taxes (gst) or similar to add on top of your base rate and this is added on the invoice, so you have base rate plus tax = total amount charged. Go to this sample of an invoice. Download sample invoice PDF file here. My sample is called a tax invoice, simply becuase in Australia I am registered for gst. If you are not registered for gst then you call it an invoice, not a tax invoice. Make sure that your invoice has all information on it required by the law of your country, state, etc. For Austalians go to this link on deciding whether to register for gst or not.
Aust Tax Office goods and services information
. Detail of job undertaken - eg: Inspection Report Go to this sample of a time billing sheet. Download sample time billing sheet PDF file here. I then convert these two documents into pdf documents and email them to my clients. I even fax one invoice and time billing to another client. You may mail the invoices as well if you prefer or hand deliver to close by clients. Virtual assistant billing your clients - subcontracting I subcontract my services out to a major transcription company and they don't require me to bill them, they actually generate the invoices themselves. The invoices outline exactly the jobs that I have typed up for them every fortnight. So that saves me the hassles of producing these invoices. I double check them against the jobs I typed though as sometimes there are mistakes made in them.
Receiving payments Most of the time you should not have a problem in receiving monies from your client in the allocated time when billing clients. I have one particular client who is always late to pay and luckily I don't do too much work for him. I resend my invoice and time billing sheets via email to him and he pays on the second reminder. You may come across clients that are known to rip off virtual assistants and by joining a virtual assistant network, ladies always report bad clients to other members so that others will not get burnt as they did. Eventually these businesses or individuals are cut out of the industry as no one will go near them. In worst case scenarios you may not receive payment at all and although there are no set rules, if a client has not paid in a couple of months I recommend that you refuse to do any further work for them until that payment has been received. Unfortunately you may need to use the services of debt collection agencies, but sometimes this may not a viable option unless the amount owed to you is substantial. You may wish to receive your monies via electronic bank transfer, check/cheque, cash if your client is local or set up Paypal if your client is not local. When you signup for PayPal, you can start accepting credit card payments instantly and have monies deposited into your bank account. As the world's number one online payment service, PayPal is the fastest way to open your doors to over 86 million member accounts worldwide. Best of all, it's completely free to sign up! To sign up or learn more,
Click here! So as a virtual assistant billing your clients and receiving payment is not too difficult once you are set up and you get in the habit of noting down specific times that you spend on a particular client's work. Sometimes you may have multiple client jobs on your table and you're jumping from one to the other and it can be difficult to keep accurate time, especially if you're jotting it down on a piece of paper. I open my time billing invoices and update as I go. However you may prefer to download a time billing software and this link is to a free download
www.syntap.com
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