How to create an invoicing workflow in Found

Problem: Creating customized, professional invoices can be time consuming as a small business owner, especially if you don’t have in–house design support. Even worse: once you’ve sent invoices to clients, you’ll need to manually track which ones have been paid and then manually follow up with your clients if there are any overdue. 

Some tools exist to help with invoice creation and tracking, but they may require manual work to reconcile when you’re actually paid into your bank account—not to mention they may come with their own subscription or per-invoice fees.

Solution: Found enables you to create and send unlimited free invoices, directly from your banking app. You can give your clients a variety of online payment options, including direct deposit, credit card, debit card, and Cash App Pay, while getting paid into your Found checking account.

Rather than manually tracking outstanding invoices and sending reminders, Found lets you set up auto-reminders when you create an invoice and quickly see which invoices are paid and which are outstanding from within our dashboard.

Step-by-Step Instructions

Step 1: Set up Stripe to accept card payments

If you would like to accept credit and debit card payments through invoices, you must first set up an account with our partner Stripe, a popular payment processor.

Within Invoices, go to Payment methods, and select Set up next to Stripe. We will securely share information with Stripe (i.e. name, address, phone number, social security number, Found routing and account numbers) to speed up the process of opening a Stripe account.

Once you’ve successfully set up a Stripe account and you go to create a new invoice, you will see the new payment methods (e.g., credit and debit card) enabled.

Learn more: How do I accept card payments in Found?

If you already use Stripe for your business, you will still need to sign up for an account via Found to accept card payments through our invoicing tool. However, you should use the email address associated with your existing Stripe account so that you can access both accounts from the same Stripe dashboard.

Step 2: Create an estimate

If your clients prefer that you send a project estimate or quote before a formal invoice, you can easily do that with Invoice Estimates.

In the Invoices section of the app, click Create new and then Create estimate to create a new estimate. You can add items, optional notes, and attachments—all the same information as an invoice, just without the payment link. 

Found will notify you once your client clicks “Accept” and then you can easily convert it to an invoice by selecting Convert to invoice on the estimate. At this point, you can change the due date, make any additional customizations, and then either send it immediately or schedule it for later.

Learn more: Introducing Invoice Estimates

Step 3: Create and customize an invoice

Whether you’re creating an invoice from scratch or converting an estimate, Found gives you several options to customize before sending.

In your Invoice settings, you can upload your logo and customize the invoice color, contact info, and more.

When creating an invoice, you can add pre-saved line items (i.e. common products or services with the same pricing), add optional notes, and attach files (e.g. contracts, proposals, purchase order) as needed.

You can also select a due date and set up a series of automatic reminder emails before, on, and after that due date.

Step 4: Send or schedule an invoice

Once you’ve added all of the information to your invoice, you can choose to send immediately or schedule for a later date. You can also choose to make the invoice recurring, in cases where you plan to send an identical invoice to the same client several times in the future.

Tip: You can even CC other recipients on an invoice by clicking Add another recipient below the recipient contact and typing any other email(s) you’d like to send it to, separated by commas. 

You can also share an invoice via link rather than sending it automatically through Found. This can be especially useful if you’re retroactively sending an invoice (i.e. you’ve already been paid and simply want the invoice as a record).  

To do this: click Copy link after creating the invoice, which you can then paste into your own email or text message.

Step 5: Track outstanding invoices

In the Unpaid tab of the Invoices section, you can click into an unpaid invoice to see which reminders in this series have been sent. 

An invoice will change from the status of Unpaid to Overdue once the due date has passed. Once this happens, you can select Send a Reminder to send another manual reminder email.

Step 6: Mark invoices as paid, if not already 

If your customers pay an invoice with a card, Found will automatically classify that as Business Income and mark that invoice as paid in your Found app.

Note: by default, Stripe will transfer funds into your Found account every day. Therefore, you will typically receive payment into your Found account two business days after your customers have paid you. You can see more information about payment schedules here.

If your invoice is paid via bank transfer to your Found account, we will do our best to match that income transaction to your invoice. 

If we are not able to match it, you will need to click into the invoice that was paid by bank transfer and manually select Mark as Paid. This will ensure that your invoicing reporting remains up-to-date and any future reminders are no longer required.

To ensure you’re tracking this invoice payment in your bookkeeping, you will be asked if you want to link this invoice to a deposit transaction already in Found's Activity feed or if you’d like to manually create an income transaction (i.e. if that income was received outside of Found.)

Conclusion

And that’s a quick rundown of how to get started with invoicing on Found! Through these invoice customizations, payment options, and scheduling automations, you can build an efficient invoicing workflow that impresses your clients and saves you time as a business owner—best of both worlds!

Make sure to check out our Guide to Getting Paid, which goes through other common ways to get paid into your account such as direct deposit, Tap-to-Pay, and payment requests.