One way to make your invoices less scary

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If you’re like me, you always feel a twinge of guilt when sending an invoice to a client. It’s not that you feel you’ve done a bad job, you just find it hard to ask for money, especially when it’s in exchange for doing something you enjoy.

Wording the email/letter is difficult. It has to go something along the lines of “Hi, I’ve attached an invoice for x which you have to pay in 14 days. Please.”

Recently, I’ve started adding a few Google Analytics stats to client emails when I’m sending them an invoice for content changes they’ve asked me to make on a site. I feel that I’m giving the client useful information that makes my request for money seem a little less routine, and hope that it shows I care as much about the success of their website as they do.

For example, for one client who organises children’s parties, I let her know that “netmums” was her top referring site which had an average time on site 3 times greater than the overall site average. I also told her that the linger time for returning visitors was 2 times the average for the site overall, indicating that people coming back did so because they were making a decision, or they were going through the site with someone else.

I then got this reply:

Thanks so much for all that info its really useful! I was about to pull my netmums subscription but now I am so not going to!

This wouldn’t be possible with every client invoice, especially for sites that have just gone live and don’t have any useful stats, but for clients you want to maintain a long term relationship with, this might make your request for money a little less painful.

Is there something you can recommend to make invoices more friendly?