Custom Invoice Layouts In Sage 50 And Xero

It has been a week of designing custom invoice layouts. Some very knowledgable people were baffled and asked for help ...

First up was an issue that came in over the weekend. I was sent a Xero layout problem by an accountant. Two or three people had tried to customise a Xero invoice layout, which is managed through Microsoft Word, and had left it in an almighty mess.

There were columns out of line, unit prices with too many decimal places and floating boxes which just didn't behave and stay where they should. I actually really enjoyed getting my teeth into fixing a Word document with hidden tables and other fun problems.

"I got a tremendous feeling of satisfaction by producing a well-presented invoice to my client's own client!"

Then on Monday, I moved onto a Sage 50 report design, something which I am much more comfortable with. The customer this time was printing invoices on purchased invoice template paper, then scanning it back in so they could email it to their own customers.

You can imagine how time-consuming that was. I redesigned their invoice, statement and remittance layouts so all would look good with logos on plain paper, making the bank details for payment really obvious too. I'm pleased to say they were very happy with the results.

While there, I was also able to talk them through the good housekeeping techniques and keeping their Sage tidy on their Sage 50 data too.

They had been running since 2004 and had never cleared down old data or deleted any invoices (there were over 9000 invoices saved!) so there were performance improvements to be made. Together, these two changes will be saving them loads of time as invoicing and backing up will be much quicker for them in the future.

Some very complicated issues to resolve with these custom invoice layouts, but I now have two very happy customers!

If anything I've written here resonates with you, call me on 01604 420057 and let's see how we can help you.