Unless your business is big enough that you can afford to have someone do it for you, you will probably be sending out invoices.
But invoicing isn’t as simple as letting your checking account register how much money you collected and how much money you paid out.
For one thing, your payments rarely just automatically show up. If you send an invoice, you have to manage this process. You have to hope that your client will pay promptly, not demand that you send an invoice, and so on. You have to balance your books every month.
And your customers are probably not all equally reliable. We have all been stiffed by clients who refused to pay, or who demanded that we pay them twice.
You also have to decide whether you will accept checks, and under what conditions; whether to accept partial payments, or pre-payments, and whether to bill by the hour or by the job.
There are probably as many ways to do invoicing as there are writers of invoicing software. But the usual approach, called “”freelance”” best free invoicing software for small business, seems the simplest and most flexible: you keep track of the number of hours you work, and multiply that by a standard hourly rate.
If you charge by the hour, you have to keep track of how many hours you spent, and multiply that by the standard rate. If you charge by the job, you have to keep track of how much time you spend per item, and multiply that by the standard rate. In both cases, the worse you do at keeping track, the more complicated your billing becomes.