You just wrapped everything up with your latest brand partnership (congrats!). The content is approved and it’s in Tailwind’s Instagram scheduling tool, ready to go live soon.
Now you just need to send an invoice to the brand to get paid… But important questions can slow down this process: Who do you need to send the invoice to? Was there a PO number? What were the payment terms again? My payment is late, how should I communicate this?
If invoicing and getting paid sometimes feels like a chore, don’t worry – you’re not alone.
Unless you have an agent taking care of invoicing and payments for you, it can take time & energy and get awkward. This guide is written to provide tips and tricks making invoicing easy in order to minimize payment issues.
Sending your invoice should be the first step to getting paid. Always. Even when a brand, agency or influencer platform says you do not need to, it’s important to send your own invoices. But why?
As a creator, you are running your own small business. It’s important to have a record of all your earnings for tax purposes and what’s owed to you so you can get paid. Marketers work with dozens or even hundreds of influencers. It’s not uncommon that payments are sometimes late or forgotten!
Tracking your invoice is equally as important as sending it. If you’re only sending a few invoices you can manage tracking in excel or Google sheets. A perfect creator-built option for invoicing brands is a tool called Lumanu. It also tracks your invoices for you. Freshbooks and QuickBooks are great if you want more advanced accounting functionality like the ability to run receivable aging reports.
No matter the choice, it’s important to capture the basics when tracking – invoice number, due date, amount, and of course the brand and contact info of who’s paying. Keeping track of these basics will ensure a smooth invoicing process for you and your brand partner.
Payment terms should always include:
Brands are more and more flexible when it comes to paying freelancers, especially social media influencers. Top brands realize that collaboration is about partnerships and flexibility can go a long way. It is a good idea to propose the payment terms and methods you prefer when engaging with a brand. Ultimately when running your business, you are going to want to choose how to manage your accounting. This starts with invoicing brands through your chosen solution.
There are some basics to get right when creating a professional invoice. You can setup an invoice template, download a free invoice template, or use a software solution to create and send professional invoices (e.g. Lumanu, Freshbooks, Quickbooks). The nice part about software is it will help with tracking invoice status as well as providing fast payment processing options.
If you’re using a software solution, they will handle these for you. Here are standard fields you should include in all your invoices:
As a general rule you can send invoices when you complete campaign deliverables or upfront (when you sign the agreement). What you actually do will depend on your negotiations with your partner. Understand your partner’s AP process as you may need to adjust timing to fit into their process or they may adjust their process to fit your timing.
Some typical terms for influencer marketing collabs are:
Keep your invoice email concise and to the point. In the subject line, be sure to include the word “INVOICE”, your name and a brief description. This will help the recipient identify your email and know to prioritize it. In the email include the amount and due date.
Chasing down payment can be frustrating and awkward, another reason to use a platform like Lumanu which will automatically follow up on invoices for you and give you visibility into the payment status of outstanding requests.
Before your invoice is due – Make sure your contact received the invoice. Ask for confirmation of receipt when the invoice is sent.
When your invoice is due – Send a gentle reminder leading up to the due date, a reminder that payment is due in 3 days helps ensure on-time payment.
When your invoice is overdue – Late payments happen for a variety of reasons. Accounts payable departments manage cash flow and often have a payments system in place. It’s important to follow up with details including when the payment was due and payment options.
Awesome, your brand partner wants to pay you more money! Or they want to ask for more stuff that’s outside of your agreement for free – it doesn’t hurt to ask.
When this happens you have a couple options – create and send another invoice or cancel the original invoice and update and resend with the expanded scope and new dollar amount. You’ll want to make sure you create a new invoice number and send a cancellation for the old invoice so that you are paid the correct amount.
Purpose built for creators: Lumanu was built from the ground up to meet influencers invoicing needs. It’s iPhone friendly and they’ve made invoicing as simple as Venmo. Plus, we love their year-to-date earnings, tracking and clean dashboard to easily track payment status. It’s free to create and send invoices and they charge a processing fee that’s lower than PayPal, with payments sent directly to your bank account. Lumanu Payments is “invite only”, Tailwind is happy to offer special access to Lumanu Payments.
Advanced features for the small empire: Freshbooks is worth a look if you need full fledged accounting software and bookkeeping. We’re talking accounts receivable aging reports, general ledger entries and full P&L reporting. The extra bells and whistles will cost you a low monthly fee along with higher payment processing costs on the invoices.
For the do-it-yourself freelancer: Most online “free” templates you find through a website will then charge for payment processing (have to make money somehow). If you want to create and send your own templates, we recommend grabbing an invoice template from Microsoft Office in either word or excel. You can always open in Google docs as well if you are not an Office user.
Example Microsoft template:
Managing your small business as a creative freelancer just got easier – we hope! By running a consistent process to make sure payment terms are agreed to upfront and accurate invoices are sent, you’ll spend less time worrying about chasing payment and more time creating. There are plenty of resources available to help you grow your business and ultimately your brand.
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