I use Notion to manage my invoices as a small business owner — here's how

If you’ve ever been part of an invoicing process, you’ll know what a weird process it can be. There’s a sort of awkwardness about asking for money for work you’ve already done in many instances, as well as a little bit of excitement to see the back of a big project.

My business is, let’s be honest, tiny. I write, I send a draft and I invoice. But managing everything has been a complicated mess of spreadsheets and documents - until I started using Notion.

'Kanban' you believe it?

The first thing to note is that Notion can do many things. It can be a document editor, a complex, labyrinthine life tracker, a task manager and plenty more besides.

The magic of it, however, is its flexibility. I started my Notion page as a database of all of my work. It included handy information like clients, amounts, deadlines, notes, and just about anything else pertinent to what I was doing, but it just ended up feeling like a Google Sheet.

That’s when I switched to ‘Board View’, creating a Kanban-style timeline of projects. I can see the number of pieces I’m working on right now, and a look at what I’ve sent, invoiced, and more, all at a glance.

I can even run a widget on my Notion dashboard to show how many payments are outstanding. I don’t doubt there’s a whole host of bespoke software options for this very process, but this is something I built myself — it doesn’t get much more bespoke than that.

When handing it off to my accountant, I can switch to table view so she can ensure everything is where it needs to be, and I’ve begun experimenting with automation, too.

A little way to go

Now, when I add a ‘Draft Sent’ date, Notion moves a project from the ‘In Progress’ column to the ‘Done’ one, and adding an Invoiced Date or Payment Date entry will update it accordingly, too.

Notion’s betting big on AI agents, but as a very small business that I run with assistance from my wife, that’s not something I’m in need of — at least for now.

What I could do with, however, is a little more flexibility. I have to run an awkward tracker for invoice numbers at the top of my database to remind me what the next one in sequence will be, because Notion can do everything except tick a number upward by one with each entry, it seems.

Final thoughts

While I know I can make invoices themselves within Notion and attach them to my database entries (something I’m already doing with expense receipts), I’ve stuck with my existing invoice template in Apple’s Pages of all things. I’ll no doubt move to Google Docs or Notion itself in the future, but it’s worth mentioning I’m not actually building invoices in Notion — but I am managing them there.

I will say that while Notion’s mobile app used to feel a little clunky, and its Mac and Windows apps are essentially wrappers for the web interface, I can’t fault it on any platform right now.

Your mileage may vary, depending on what you throw in there and how complex it could be, but it’s become a godsend for keeping my head in the game as far as deadlines go.

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