How to keep track of unpaid invoices as a freelancer

It’s the end of the month. Over the last weeks you sent invoices to 4 clients, and you’re not sure which of them have paid. The invoices are PDFs in a folder, the payments are in your bank account, and the only way to find out is to compare the two line by line.

The fix is to keep one record per invoice, in one place, from the day you send it. Here is how I’d set that up.

Record the invoice when you send it

Write down the amount, the due date, the client and the project the moment the invoice goes out, and attach the PDF. It takes a minute then, and it saves the search at month-end.

ToDev keeps this record for you, but it doesn’t create, send or charge invoices. So keep writing invoices wherever you write them now, and record each one in ToDev when you send it.

Keep expenses in the same place

Hosting, software subscriptions and the train ticket to a client’s office all count. When income and expenses are recorded together, you see what you earned and what you spent in the same view, instead of adding them up from 2 places.

Each account keeps its records in one currency, euros or US dollars, so the totals add up without conversions.

At month-end, check pending and overdue

This is the step that replaces comparing PDFs with your bank account. Money shows what’s pending, what’s overdue, and what you’ve earned and spent.

You can filter by status (All, Pending, Paid), by type and by client, or show only the overdue records. The overdue filter is the one to open first, since those are the clients to write to this week.

Mark it paid with the date the money arrived

When a payment shows up in your account, mark the invoice paid. ToDev asks for the payment date, with today already selected, and refuses future dates. The record then shows “Paid on” with that date.

The date is worth getting right, since it shows you later which clients paid late.

Check one client

On the web each client has a page with a payments summary, their projects, their invoices and their contact details. So before you start a new project for a client, you can see in one place whether the last invoice was paid.

Hand the numbers to your accountant

Export CSV downloads the records the table shows, with the current filters applied. Filter to paid income, export, and you have a file to send instead of a folder of PDFs.

Basic covers 3 invoices for free. Business is 2,49€ a month for 50, and Premium 4,99€ a month with no limit. If you also want the week’s tasks in the same place, I wrote about planning a freelance week by client and project.