Your first 15 minutes

This is the shortest path from an empty account to an invoice you could actually send. Everything here is reversible, so it is safe to try on your real workspace.

1. Fill in your invoicing profile

Open Settings, Invoicing. This is the one step you cannot skip, because it holds the details that German law requires an invoice to carry: your company name and address, your tax number or VAT ID, and the bank details a client pays into.

Do this first. Doing it later means going back and reissuing anything you created in the meantime.

2. Add the client

Two records, in this order:

1. Organizations: the company you bill. The country and VAT ID you set here decide how VAT is treated on every invoice to them, so they are worth getting right.
2. Contacts: the person you actually talk to, linked to that organization.

If you invoice private individuals rather than companies, you still create an organization. It is the billable party, whatever it is called.

3. Create a project

Projects, then New. A project is the piece of work, and it is what everything else hangs off. Point it at the organization you just created, set a rate, and leave it in the first pipeline stage.

4. Track some time against it

Open Time. Log a few hours against the project. Mark them billable, because non-billable hours never reach an invoice.

5. Turn that time into an invoice

Invoices, then New, and choose the same client. In the editor, use Add tracked time: it offers every unbilled hour for that client and you deselect anything you are not ready to bill.

Hours with no rate cannot be invoiced, and the dialog tells you how many are in that state.

6. Check and finalize

Before finalizing, the checklist tells you what is still missing. Finalizing assigns the invoice number and locks the document, which is the point of no return: a finalized invoice can no longer be edited, only corrected with a Rechnungskorrektur.

Then download the PDF and send it yourself. Steerd does not email invoices to your clients.

What to do next

• Invite the rest of your team under Settings, Team, and give each person a role.
• If you drive or travel to clients, look at Travel, which computes German per diems for you.
• If you need to send structured e-invoices, XRechnung and ZUGFeRD are built in.