Invoicing for freelancers

What does a freelance invoice involve?

Most freelance invoicing tools make a tidy invoice and email it. The work comes before that: turning the week’s hours into the numbers on the invoice.

If your hours live in a separate time tracker, you export a timesheet. Then you re-type it, line by line, into a tool that has no record of the client or the project. At month end, under time pressure, this is where billable hours go missing.

The second part is the money view. An invoice tells you what you sent. It does not tell you how the month went once software subscriptions, contractors and expenses are counted. Most freelancers keep that in a spreadsheet they update when they remember.

What does Sum do for a solo freelancer?

Sum is Lyto’s invoicing and costs app. For a freelancer it covers both parts:

• Bill from tracked time. Hours logged in Tally against a client become invoice line items. You export nothing and re-enter nothing.
• Costs and income together. Sum tracks what you spend as well as what you bill. A month’s position is one view in the app.
• One client record. The person you invoice is the same contact in your Pipeline CRM. You enter them once.

What Sum does not do

Sum covers invoicing and cost tracking. It is not full accounting software. To file taxes or hand the books to an accountant, you may still want dedicated bookkeeping software, and Sum can give it the figures.

For raising invoices, chasing payment and checking the month, Sum sits next to your time tracking and CRM. The hours, the client and the invoice share one record, so you copy nothing between apps.

Still invoicing from a spreadsheet? The guide to moving an invoice spreadsheet into Sum covers the customer import and your unpaid invoices.

What it costs

One seat is €10 per month, billed annually, or €13 billed monthly. Sum is one of the seven apps that seat includes. The 14-day trial needs no card, and you cancel with one click.