Invoicing for a small business

My company is selling hand made soap and other accessories for body. I started producing soap at home just as a hobby. I was making soap for myself and for friends and relatives of me. I saw that people like my soap. One day my sister said, “I would buy this shower gel even if it would cost 20 EUR.” And it was very good idea actually. I made a conception of how my products could be wrapped into nice paper with flowers and so on. First I couldn’t afford to rent a shop. I decided to organize selling though the internet. My brother is programmer and he made the website for me. I sold my products very successfully.

When the volume of my business increased I was forced to make some improvements in it. And the problem I faced was invoicing and bookkeeping. With invoicing I dealt somehow using MS Excel, but bookkeeping was something really unfamiliar for me. I wanted to spend time only on my product’s making, but was forced to do other things also. I could hire some assistant, but my turnover wasn’t too big to employ someone for the full working day. I wanted to manage everything by myself, because I usually trust myself more then other people. Maybe it is not very nice quality of my character. I was lucky to find a solution to my problem.

The solution was called invoicing software. Actually it was invoicing and accounting software. I started to issue invoices in more professional way. I sent it right from the program to the customer’s email address. I forgot about going to the post office. It saved me a lot of precious time. With bookkeeping it was more complicated. Only after I took bookkeeping courses, I could understand accounting module of my software. First my sister helped me a little, because she is bookkeeper. After some 2 months I did all invoicing and bookkeeping by myself. It was quite fast and simple. I can’t imagine how people do things like that manually. I adore my best assistant in business – my software, which let me spend more time on things I enjoy.