Editor’s Note: This blog post was originally published in October 2017 and has been fully updated and improved in August 2023 to be comprehensive and easily understood.
Do you have a business that offers services along with their physical products? Then you need to know how to invoice services.
Especially in the B2B market, most companies require an invoice before they place a payment, making it rather crucial for the service provider to be able to generate an invoice quickly and properly. Did you know, that in Megaventory you can have separate documents to invoice your B2B and retail customers?
In this article, we cover how to invoice services in Megaventory, track your service fees, and include services in a work order.
How To Track Services
In Megaventory, a service is considered any non-physical product that is charged but there is no stock reduction when a sale is made.
Therefore, under the product type of “service”, you can track delivery fees, installation costs, labor costs, or even your hourly rates if you are a designer, a lawyer, an engineer, or any freelancer whatsoever.
Before starting invoicing your clients, your first step is to add your services as products in Megaventory.
- Log in to your Megaventory account and go to Products and Services.
- Click New Product – Service.
- In the Product Type, select the option Service.
- Fill out the other fields, including the Default Sales Price if you have a standard cost for this service.
- Hit Insert to add it to your product list.
If you’re wondering about how to stay on top of the additional costs of incoming goods, don’t worry. The Megaventory Landed Cost feature will help you know exactly how much you are paying for incoming goods.
Pro Tip: If you offer your services for free, you can still include them in the invoice with a zero price.
Selling and Invoicing Both Services and Products
For the sake of an example, let’s imagine the following scenario: your company sells electric appliances such as air conditioners. As an added service you offer the installation of purchased appliances for an added cost, which has a flat fee.
The above is a sample invoice created within Megaventory. Headers and footers can be customized to include information like declamatory messages or QR codes, to make sure you give the right message to your customers.
Pro Tip: Especially for sales the customer may need additional help after their purchase. So it is advised to include info on how they can reach you best.
Checking Stock Availability
When it is time to send the products to the customer and you click to ship and invoice, you can see the stock availability of the items to check that everything is right (or not).
Next to the air conditioner, you can see that you have a product availability of 5. The box next to the installation fee, though, is empty. That happens because there is no physical restriction to how many times you can offer this service. Pretty convenient, right?
Managing Manufacturing With Services
If you are in the manufacturing industry, you may want to track the labor cost of a work order. This is in order to calculate how much this product fully costs you.
This may be really helpful for Megaventory users that have pricing rules in place which automatically calculate the sales price of a product depending on its cost. For example, you can create a pricing rule for the sales prices of certain products to be the manufacturing cost + 20%.
Back to services, let’s see a scenario where you create custom-made shoes.
With the manufacturing module of Megaventory, you can track the leather – the raw material – and the service or labor cost of the professional shoemaker as different parts of the work order.
Again, next to the leather, you can see the product availability in the selected inventory location, while there is no number next to the shoemaker’s cost.
Now that you know how to invoice for services in Megaventory, you can easily bill your clients and partners. Importing your standard service fees into your account will save you time to do the thing you love more as an entrepreneur: running your business.