Easy Books

Easy Books will generate an invoice in PDF format, which it will attach to an email for you to send to yourself for printing, or direct to your customers. If the sale is marked as a credit note, a full credit note is produced instead. The process is the same for iPhone and iPad versions, the screenshots show the iPad version as this feature really works so well on the larger screen.

You can set your own company logo or headed paper, the from-address, customer address, invoice number, reference (PO), date, payment terms, page footer and item lines. You can also change the name of your VAT scheme (useful if you use GST), and you can change title of the invoice too, so you can change the "Sales Invoice" to read "Tax Invoice" if you prefer.

Tapping on the action button from the Sales Invoice screen starts the process.

Your Address

If you haven't already set your business address, you will be taken to a screen to enter the information first. Enter the address as you would like it to appear on the invoice, using the return key to separate each line. You can also add your office phone number and/or email address at the bottom of the address.

Company Logo / Headed Paper

There is a space of 2cm height (0.8") by up to 17cm (6.7") wide at the top of the invoice. This space is reserved for your company logo. The image you provide is scaled to the height available, and aligned on the right of the page. The business address is indented 4cm from the right side of the logo, so the best size for a company logo is 4 x 2 cm, or about 400x200 pixels. You can of course produce a complete 17cm x 2cm image for the whole top of the page. You can lay out the logo in whatever position suites you, aligning something in the image to the address would mean putting it at 13cm from the left side. If the image is less than 4cm wide, the image is aligned with the left hand side of the address.

The image above shows the key dimensions for a good header image. The file is listed in the attachments section below, so you can download it as a template for your own image.

To set the logo in Easy Books, you pick from images stored on the iPad or iPhone. You can either produce the logo on the computer and sync with the device to transfer the image over, or if the image is available online, view it using Safari on the iPad and simply tap and hold on the image. You can save the image to your photo roll using this method.

You might like to use the simple heading image below to try this out before making your own logo.

Footer

The footer occupies the bottom 1cm of the page. It is usually given over to the company registered address, the registration number and VAT registration number.

Customer Address

This address is stored against the customer record, so you only need to enter it once for each customer.

Their Reference

If your customer uses Purchase Order numbers, or use a reference number for your account with them, you can enter this in Easy Books. This is printed on the invoice or credit note.

Terms

The payment terms occupy a space towards the bottom of the page. You would typically use this to assert your payment terms, such as "Payment is due 14 days from date of invoice". You can also include your bank details for your customer to make direct transfers, and a note that all amounts are in your chosen currency; for example "All amounts above are in US Dollars".

You can set your business standard terms (from version 3.6), which apply when there are no specific customer terms set. This helps reduce the amount of data to enter if you use the same terms for all (or most) customers. To do this, set the terms in the settings for your business rather than the customer.

Invoice Output

The invoice is produced in PDF format and displayed in the iPhone or iPad. To send the invoice as an email you must have purchased the "Customer Invoicing" extra, if not the app will take you to a screen where you can complete the purchase. The invoice lists each line item (up to a maximum of ten lines). If you enter more than ten lines, the app automatically combines the rest into one line for you.

You can view an example invoice produced by Easy Books by downloading the PDF below.