When we first started out, we were just some recent college grads who needed to go to work. The idea of creating a company to help folks with IT issues seemed like a no-brainer. After all, we had been “dabbling” in that a bit while were in school to ensure we had beer money.

However, “dabbling” is very different from building a business, especially a profitable one. We understood how to make technology work for our clients, but we were pretty fuzzy on the core tasks of running a business day-to-day.

The greatest hurdles we faced were tracking time, invoicing customers and most importantly, getting paid. At the end of every month, we would pour over spreadsheets to figure out what to invoice and what to pay our technicians. Even after we got the invoices out, we often still had to battle to get our money because of miscommunication with the clients.

It became a huge pain point for us.

After a while, we realized that the only way we were going to relieve the pain of it all was to build an invoicing process and an engine to power it. The engine, of course, became SherpaDesk, and the process was developed around some time-proven ideas and solid advice we received from more “seasoned” business owners.

Honestly, it was the process of writing down what we needed to consider and then documenting the steps we would take to do a better job tracking billable and non-billable hours, and setting expectations and improving communication with our clients. We tried not to overcomplicate it and just focused on making it easy for the companies and us.

The infographic below highlights what is important to consider in building the perfect invoicing process. We believe by sharing these ideas in an infographic and providing free access to SherpaDesk we can make the job of running a business a little easier for you.

Let us know how it all comes together for you.