We love an invoice, especially when it’s a paid one. But once the payment has been made and you continue living your life what are we actually supposed to be doing with these PDF files? What’s the point in keeping and organising them? What purpose do they serve post payment?
Well, there’s a multitude of reasons as to why you should keep and organise your invoices.
Tax Reasons
Ah yes, boring old tax filing. Sorry to bring this dull one up first but let’s get it out of the way shall we? Your invoices are essentially documentation that helps to confirm the information you list on your tax filings each year. The IRS recommends that all small business owners should keep daily records summarising their business transactions, including invoices. It basically just makes the process a whole lot easier.
Legal Protection
Invoices help protect small businesses from false lawsuits, because invoices provide details of the services you provide to your clients and the timeline of when you complete the work. An invoice also provides a record of the amount a client agreed to pay you for your services and signed invoices can serve as legally binding agreements. Emails are super important in this as they record when the invoices were sent and paid and who from.
Marketing
Records of your invoices can help you develop strategies for marketing your business. You can analyse your invoices to identify peak times when your services are most in demand, the most popular and least popular services you offer and other trends in your business. Once you identify these trends, you can develop smart marketing strategies based on the data to grow your business.
In terms of organising your invoices, keeping them in a Drive folder is a great way to ensure you won’t lose any. Google Docs also naturally dates documents’ editing history which is useful. However, if you really aren’t in the mood to keep a folder, email in a way is a permanent and semi-organised history of which documents were sent when and to whom. So you’re kind of off the hook either way.
