This Podcast Is Episode Number 448, And It's About Invoicing Construction Clients The Fast And Easy Way Creating invoices and receipts is vital to successfully running a business. You need receipts to track your purchases and expenses. Your clients need invoices for their tax purposes and to manage their finances. Paper receipts and invoices have been around a long time, so many people are used to them and may even resist moving away from them.  Thanks to technology, paper receipts and invoices are becoming more a thing of the past. There are environmental reasons for the move. Paper invoices require millions of trees and billions of gallons of water to produce, and they emit carbon dioxide (CO2), so going paperless can be a good thing for the environment. The Old Way Contractors Invoiced the jobs was sometimes just as much or more work than doing the job itself. In the past, you needed to make notes, collect customer information, go to your office, open QuickBooks or whatever construction accounting software you were using, wait for everything to load up, and then try to find the paperwork, open the invoice screen, and fill it out and if you were lucky, you could email it from QuickBooks to your customer. Then you waited for the check in the mail to arrive to get paid. Our contractor clients, or perhaps some of you are already implementing this, now have two choices depending on what you are most comfortable with, QuickBooks Desktop Version In The Cloud or Xero Accounting Online. You can directly invoice your clients on Jobsite with your smartphone linked to your Quickbooks or Xero account. QuickBooks or Xero Accounting Online for construction depends on how you get paid, the type of work your company does, and if you need Job Costing. QuickBooks Desktop Version Online Works Best If You: Take Job Deposits Have Change Orders Issues Multiple Invoices Need Work-In-Progress Need Job Costing Reports Need Payment Applications Need Periodic Invoices For Bank draws Need Complex Construction Accounting Reports At the price point, Intuit offers all versions of QuickBooks, including QuickBooks Pro, QuickBooks For Contractors, and QuickBooks For Contractors Enterprise. No other construction accounting software comes close to providing the robust Job Costing Reports, Work-In-Progress Reports And Tracking (WIP), and hundreds of other combined reports and features medium and large contractors need to operate and grow their construction company. Xero Accounting Online Works Best If You: Need To Get Paid Faster And Easier Have Simple Jobs You Invoice Individually Need To Invoice Customers At The Jobsite Need Key Performance Indicator Financial Reports Want Professional Construction Accounting At Lower Costs Xero Accounting Online saves us time in data entry, which means we can offer Xero Accounting Online outsourced contractors bookkeeping services at substantial savings over QuickBooks outsourced contractors bookkeeping services and provide more in-depth financial reporting with some of the reports being updated within seconds of when the transactions are received. Here are all the more reasons why your construction business should consider eliminating paper receipts and invoices. 1. Decreased costs Receipts eat into your profits. It costs money to buy the paper and the ink--more than it costs to have an email receipt emailed to clients. Your business saves money by having the receipts emailed instead of printing invoices and receipts for every client. On a per-unit basis, invoices might not seem like a considerable cost, but over a year or a few years, they can add up to thousands of dollars.   2. Increased efficiency It takes time to print it out, change the printer paper and otherwise ensure that everything is working correctly. Meanwhile, your customers and clients wait for their documents to be printed out and handed or mailed to them. Beyond that, how often does a client contact you because they've lost...