Invoicing and Estimating from Start to Finish in Zoho Books

If you want to make your billing and accounting hassle-free, you require Zoho Books for small business. The platform allows you to move from a deal memo to an invoice in just a few clicks. Moreover, you can create accurate estimates and send bills to more businesses with better invoicing management.

Building Your Items and Customers

The inventory list in your invoicing system is the price list. It consists of items that you bill your customers for. These bills can be for installations by the unit, consulting by the hour, or goods by the kilo.

Add New Items to Zoho Books

Items are a part of billing documents. The fields that you can customize for an item include name, unit, the rate per unit, and tax rate. You can also include items manually from the invoice and estimate builder. However, using pre-loaded items help you complete the task faster.

Add New Customers to Zoho Books

Invoices and estimates are sent to the customers. You can add customers manually while creating an invoice or estimate. For added benefits, it is suggested that you use the built-in address book.

Working with Estimates

The best way to define estimates is - a calculated guess for the cost of a project. A majority of B2B services require a level of estimation before approval of the project. For direct-to-consumer businesses, only the ones offering custom work require estimations to arrive at mutually agreed expectations.

Many business owners feel that they can build an invoice and then change the title to ‘Estimate’. However, that activity is not taken well by bookkeeping software. A Zoho books consultant can help you understand how to build an estimate and the importance of this particular step in the billing pipeline. Estimates can be taken as an automation trigger for many different CRM workflows.

Building and Sending Invoices

After the approval of an estimate, it is forwarded to the invoice stage. According to your industry’s standards, you can alter the invoice to build a bill for advance or upfront payment in totality.