Excel is an incredibly powerful tool that’s being used by countless businesses and individuals to create documents like financial statements, marketing reports and timesheets. However, did you know that Excel can also be used to create invoices? Thanks to its versatility, the iconic spreadsheet program allows you to customise your invoices to include all the elements you need.
While it’s easy to come up with a basic invoice on Excel, it takes some work to build one that’s fully tailored to you and your clients’ needs, so some additional design software goes a long way in making your Excel invoices presentable. In this article, we’ll explore some strategies you can use when drafting your own Excel invoices to make them more presentable.
We highly recommend using a regular template when sending invoices to clients to appear professional and transparent. Thankfully, you don’t need to build one entirely from scratch each time: you can find countless printable invoice templates on Adobe Express that won’t cost you a dime. Once you find one that fits your needs, simply make a few minor adjustments to suit your branding and service, and you’ll be sending invoices in no time.
If your invoice requires some features that aren’t available on the pre-made templates, you can import the Adobe Express template into Excel and adjust it yourself for extra benefits. These include the ability to add pictures of you and your client’s logos, create customisable borders and freeze important rows or columns.
Once you have your template, creating new invoices becomes as easy as editing one or two sections of your Excel document, saving it as a new file and emailing it to your client. Using a consistent invoice template also makes things easier for clients, as they won’t need to spend time figuring out how much they need to pay you and how to send you your payment each time they receive a new invoice. If you’d like to smooth out the payment process for both you and your client, standardised, consistent invoice templates are the way to go.
The ability to create distinct columns is an essential Excel feature when it comes to drafting invoices. Columns allow you to organise data such as the payment amount, payment deadline and the quantity of goods or services sold in an easy-to-understand manner, which your clients will appreciate. Excel makes it super easy to label columns, so creating clean, legible invoices should be a walk in the park.
Alongside this, separating data into columns also makes tasks like sorting, filtering and data analysis extremely easy. For example, it’s much simpler to add all the values within a defined category when they’re separated into columns compared to when they’re scattered randomly across the Excel document.
Properly filtering your data also lets you build custom dashboards. A well-organised invoice benefits both you and your client, and creating columns in Excel contributes to this tremendously.
Another reason Excel makes for a great invoice-building tool is its commenting feature. Simply right-clicking on a cell or highlighted group of cells and clicking ‘Insert’ allows you to add a comment that has no impact on the data contained within the spreadsheet. This feature is perfect if you want to add an explanatory note for your client’s benefit but don’t want to make a change to the invoice itself.
Some common use cases for Excel’s comment feature include adding links to freelance articles you’ve written, explaining why you’re charging more or less for a particular item, or adding a brief description to each of the products or services you’re invoicing for. What’s more, Excel allows you to print cell comments, so clients will be able to see the comments you’ve added even if it’s standard procedure for them to print hard copies to read through their invoices.
Conditional formatting is an incredibly powerful tool that sets Excel apart from many of the other programs that businesses and contractors use for generic invoices. Conditional formatting can be used to highlight overdue payments in red, signal discounted prices and automatically strike through cancelled payments or orders.
While it will take some time to learn how to manage rules in conditional formatting, doing so will make the process of creating new invoices and invoice templates infinitely easier. This tool transforms your invoices from static to interactive and allows you to avoid potential problems like missed payments, double payments and confusion over discounted rates. When you know how to use conditional formatting to its full extent in your Excel invoices, all you need to do is plug in a few numbers to generate your next one.
Gone are the days of black and white, boring invoices. You can brand yours using one of the Adobe Express templates once you have finalised your invoices in Excel and before you send them to the client. Branding your invoices can take many forms, but consider swapping out the black text and lines for a colour that is representative of your brand, making the goods or services box bordered and more graphically interesting and including your logo.
These examples are just scratching the surface of stylistic opportunities when it comes to modern invoices. Granted, you should avoid going overboard on the design and make it hard to read, but that’s why using pre-made templates and adding your colour schemes to them will help your invoices remain clear yet presentable.
It’s easy to understand why Excel has seen such widespread adoption all over the world. Aside from being able to crunch massive sets of numbers, this Microsoft program also allows you to present data in a digestible way. This is crucial if you’re using it to generate sales invoices for clients; however, these days, it’s often not enough for design-forward companies. Pairing Excel features with a creative template platform will help you perfect the numbers and organisation while crafting an invoice that is well-designed, branded and presentable.
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