Python for Entrepreneurs Transcripts
Chapter: Making money (credit cards and businesses)
Lecture: Purchase orders
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0:01
Not all of your purchases are going to come through your credit card system. In fact, some of your best customers will not ever
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put their credit card into your credit card system. And that's OK, so not all your purchases are going to be single purchases,
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they are not going to come through the credit card system, your best customers aren't going to use this. Why? Not because they don't trust you,
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but because your best customers are going to want to come and buy ten, twenty, a hundred, a thousand of your thing,
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and probably they don't want to do that by putting a thousand things into their shopping cart or in my case they would have to actually make
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a thousand separate purchases, the way the checkout flow works. Instead, what they are going to do, is they are going to give you a purchase order,
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and you are going to send them an invoice and then, some time later, it always seems to be longer than you would expect,
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longer than you kind of agreed upon, and way more variable, but eventually, they will pay that invoice and you'll get money in a big chunk.
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So, that's really great. Now, maybe this is old hat to you, when I very first got started it was not to me,
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and so it's great to have software to help you keep track of this.
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So I have two recommendations, both of these are online systems that I can recommend.
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So for my accounting, I actually use FreshBooks, and FreshBooks is decent, it has like a starter tier that's like 15 dollars a month,
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in the beginning it feels like a big deal, but once it serves to help you with enough payments and taxes and so on,
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then it doesn't seem like such a big deal after that. So you can use FreshBooks, this is cool, it will let you fill out the details,
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and an invoice, in response to a purchase order, it will actually email these directly to the people,
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you can set up Stripe and PayPal as places you can receive money and then when they fulfill those, when they pay those invoices
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which they can do online, the money will automatically go into your account. Or, you can say "send me a cheque here" or
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there is a variety of other ways in which you can pay. So FreshBooks is really nice, I recommend it,
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I've been using it for a few years and it's worked out great for me. Another one that is a little newer is this thing called Invoiced.
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And Invoiced is really nice it seems like a little more polished than FreshBooks, it seems a little bit newer, I know FreshBooks has been talking about
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they just spent ten million dollars on redesign of their web app. So I suspect FreshBooks is going to get a big bump any day now,
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whenever that thing goes live, but it's not live yet, so for the time being, at the time of this recording, Invoiced seems more polished,
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it's also cool that Invoiced has a truly free tier you get like ten clients in one user,
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the user being you and ten clients from which you can accept invoices and so on. Either one of these, I recommend you just check out both
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and pick whichever one works best for you, but there will come a time sooner rather than later, hopefully,
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that you are going to need to handle invoices and invoicing and all that kind of stuff.
3:03
In fact, even the stuff that comes through Stripe for the credit card purchases, the one off purchases on my training site,
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I actually just take those and bulk them into an invoice that I sort of pay for myself, right, here is my training course fee and boom, there it goes,
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and so then it mixes them with all my other invoices, things like from the podcast ad revenue which are almost exclusively
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done through invoices, as well as a few consulting things independently here, so it just lets everything go under this one accounting software,
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which works well because I run my stuff as a sole proprietorship so all the income I have to deal with personally anyway,
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if you are in S Corp, you would probably do it differently. Nonetheless, make sure you get some software to help out with accounting,
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because accounting is not fun but the software makes it well, almost fun, certainly when you get paid is fun.