Q&A: Using Square as a Freelancer or Service-Based Professional

[Kpay]

Hi Sellers,

On Friday, January 26th from 10am-11am PST, we hosted a Live Q&A on payment best practices for freelancers and service-based professionals. We had the Square Invoices Product Manager, Rohini Pandhi, here to help you make the most out of our invoicing product. Check out all her answers below! 

@rohini leads the product team for Square Invoices. Previous to Square, she worked as a consultant, started her own company, and has experience invoicing her own clients. She understands how important getting paid on time and having a healthy cash flow is for many small businesses.

Customize your Square Invoices to have your professional branding.A couple example questions:

• How can I protect my business from future disputes and non-payments?
• How can I automatically charge my customers for their monthly service fees? 

Thanks for all your questions and cheers!

[rohini]

@phemomenon - Yep, we have the integration so that your inventory count will automatically decrease when an invoice is paid. To learn more and ensure that setting is enabled, check out Sean’s community post.

[nawaewatan]

Man I am shocked and utterly dismayed at your attitude. Shocking and complete un-professional. It is almost 2 years that I have personaly been following this thread and hoping to get some solution. You are taking people's comments and developing a paid version of your program. Very un-ethical. 

[Helen]

@nawaewatan I took a look and see that you're interested in accepting partial payments with Square Invoices.

As Rohini mentioned in her update on partial payments we can't share a timeline for when this will be available but it is definitely on Invoice Team's radar!

I'm very sorry for the frustration that is causing in the meantime. I know this feature it's important to you and we'll announce any updates as soon as they are available.

[wisconsingirl30]

Have you thought about integrating with USPS to make shipping merchandise that our patrons have purchased from us through your site???? That would be enormously helpful!!!!

[LarryC]

Yes this would be an awesome addition. As it stands now I have to go to PayPal to purchase postage and print a shipping label.

[rohini]

Hi @wisconsingirl30 and @LarryC, thanks for your questions! Integration with USPS is something we’ve been considering. We definitely want to be able to support your whole workflow, and going to another website or payment provider to purchase postage must be inconvenient for you!  

Square currently integrates with ShipStation and in the future we’d like to include Invoices in that integration too. Thanks for staying tuned while we work on this one!

[mikealbright]

I would like to take set appointments and turn them into invoices directly.

(off topic), I do real estate shooting and would love to have a place for clients to add  "Where" information when they are scheduling themselves.  Also, when I add addresses to my 'Notes' it doesn't show up on the client's e-mail.

[southpasmusic]

That would be unbelieveably helpful for our business as well.

[rohini]

@mikealbright and @southpasmusic, thank you for your question! We don’t support setting appointments and turning them directly into invoices at the moment, but that’s a great idea. I’ll be sure to chat with our Square Appointments team to figure out how we might be able to support that kind of integration in the future.

@mikealbright in reference to part 2 of your question - it sounds like you might be adding notes your client’s directory listing, rather than in the notes field of the Invoice. Make sure to check out our help article about Invoices, or watch this video for more details:

[southpasmusic]

Hi Invoice team.  We are a music school offering lessons to our clients.  The recurring invoice function would be ideal for how we bill our lessons a month in advance.  There is a problem.  Anytime we need to make any change to the recurring invoice, it sends an email to our client.  (If we misspelled something, if we need to change the number of weeks to bill i.e. some months having 5 Mondays instead of 4) it sends another email.  Our clients would be drowning in notifications and would likely be quite upset. 

Is there a way we can limit the notifications to the client, to when the recurring invoice actually charges the card?  That would be a game changer for us.  Currently, we hand-build over 250 manual invoices a month and it is a major time investment.  Thanks for any thoughts you may have.

[ICS-Sean]

To add a comparison, other products allow for recurring invoices to stay in a "draft" status until they are approved.  Draft invoices don't send any notifications to the client until they are approved and finalized.  May be a nice option to add to Square recurring invoices.

[rohini]

Hi @southpasmusic & @ICS-Sean 👋  - This is a very timely request as we are currently updating our recurring invoicing experience for everyone; so I can tell you these changes are coming very soon! To start, we’ve already stopped all the email notifications of every recurring invoice created or updated. And soon, you’ll be able to save recurring series in draft form until you’re ready to send! If you are interested in getting early access to these changes and more please let us know by emailing betafeedback@squareup.com.

[sh67]

Is there an easy way to enter client name address and phone when creating a new invoice and to have them appear on the invoice that the client sees? Also business name would be handy!

[rohini]

Hi @sh67 - I addressed this a bit in the question by @acok above. We encourage sellers to use notes for this extra fields, but curious - in an ideal world, would all of those fields be included in all your invoices and how would you want this to look?

[ImmersiveSpaces]

I agree... traditional invoices have the client's full billing name and address on them. This is especially handy if you need to print the Square invoice page for a client.

[launchpadmedia]

Will you ever offer the option to take a deposit payment and then later apply that to an invoice when the work is complete?

In a related question, will you ever offer an estimate option that can then be converted into an invoice?

Thanks!

[DavesOriginals]

Thank you for offering this Q&A opportunity. We use invoicing often to accept deposits for future appointments clients are booking at our Tattoo Studio. We utulize many other Square services along with invoicing and have been very happy with them for many years.

My specific question is about the method used to send them. I really think we would all benefit from having the ability to text an invoice to a client. Email is not as popular as it perhaps once was. I know I can copy the link and send it other ways. We have even sent it through our business social media pages. We don't necessarily want to text hundreds of clients or potential clients from our personal cell phones to send a deposit incoice. We prefer to keep our cell phone numbers private but use a business phone, email social media etc. Since you already have their phone number for appointments and marketing purposes and it prepopulates when you're creating an invoice can you please just add the option to text the invoice as well as email it? 90% of our clients have their phone in their face at all times so they wouldn't miss a text.  But email invoices go unopened all the time. It would save us so much time and make our business that much more streamlined.

Thank you.

[rohini]

@DavesOriginals - thanks for your question and highlighting the potential for invoices in text delivery. I agree it’s not the easiest delivery method at the moment and it sounds like you have the flow down, but I’ll lay out the steps just in case. For now, you can text invoices by creating an invoice with the delivery method “Share URL Manually,” add details like your customer and item info, and then hit Share > Message. That will open up your SMS or texting apps. Or you can go to existing invoices by scrolling to the bottom and hitting the Share button there.

This flow definitely isn’t ideal for ease of use and privacy reasons like you mentioned. We’re working on streaming that process in future updates of our mobile app.

[MPS_Consulting]

We invoice a lot of our clients on-site after the work is performed. Most of the times, payment is tendered immediately, so instead of sending them an email invoice, I change the delivery to "Share URL Manually", tender the funds via Check, Credit Card, or Cash, and then your software sends a receipt.

All well and good.

However, by doing it this way the customer never sees a feedback link.  Such a link is included on the "Invoice", but not on the "Receipt" after they pay.  Adding this feature in will go a long way to getting more feedback from our clients.

[DavesOriginals]

If your clients are paying immediately quite often, maybe ask about payment first. If they are paying right there, ring it up as a transactions where you swipe their card and require signature etc. That would then kick out the receipt by text or email and would give the feedback option you're looking for. It might not be a fix all but it would increase the percentage of clients getting the feedback link instead of the invoice way of completing your transactions now where they don't see it. All payment methods still show in your end of day reporting so it shouldn't have any negative side effects.

Hope this helps!

[MaryZ]

I'm a service provider who also sells products and want to use Square to maintain my inventory count. I am selling package bundles of services and products and only invoice the customer for the bundle, not the individual products. How do I reconcile inventory for the individual products when I am not invoicing them explicitly without manually adjusting the inventory counts individually?