Picked up a tip at the Freelancers Union meetup last month that saved me 3 hours on invoicing

I was at the monthly meetup over at Flying Star on Central, and this older bookkeeper named Patricia showed me how to set up recurring invoice templates in Wave. I had been manually typing out every single invoice for the last two years. It took me maybe 15 minutes to set up, and now I save about 3 hours a month. Has anyone else found a simple tool change that cut down their admin time that much?

3 comments

3 Comments

miaprice7d ago

Whoa, two years of manual invoices? That's insane!

kim_davis7d ago

Oh man, I gotta say though - it sounds like she was doing it for "years" before she automated, not exactly two years on the dot. I mean, the post says she used the manual process for a while and then her coworker showed her the template, so the timeline might be a bit fuzzy. But yeah, any amount of time doing that by hand is way too long, right?

sandragrant7d ago

Ngl I feel personally attacked by this because I spent three years doing the same thing with QuickBooks before my accountant literally screamed at me over the phone. Honestly I thought I was being thorough by typing each one from scratch like some kind of invoice artisan. Tbh that Patricia sounds like a legend and I wish I had her around when I was wasting entire Sundays hunched over my laptop. The self-roast here is that I probably spent more time bragging about how organized I was than actually fixing the problem.