How Freelance Designer Brian Vo Stopped Losing Money by Merging His Invoices
Executive Summary
Profile: Brian Vo, 28, freelance UI/UX designer based in Seattle. Problem: Scattered invoice PDFs and unpaid balances at the end of each month. Outcome: By consolidating invoices into a single, well-structured PDF per client, Brian cut his admin time in half and reduced missed payments to zero.
Background: Great Design, Messy Paperwork
Brian is the type of freelancer clients like to keep. He answers emails quickly, hits deadlines, and quietly fixes problems they didn’t know they had. His portfolio is full of polished SaaS dashboards and app redesigns. But behind the beautiful interfaces, his back office looked very different.
Each month, Brian sent anywhere from 8 to 20 invoices:
- Design sprints billed weekly
- Hourly UX consulting sessions
- Small “quick fix” tickets for ongoing clients
- Licensing fees for deliverables
Some invoices came from his accounting software, exported as PDFs. Others were one-off documents created in a design tool and saved locally. A few were generated on the fly when a client asked, “Can you just send a quick invoice for this part?”
On his laptop, it looked like this:
Invoice_StudioNorth_Jan7.pdfNorth_retainer_hours_week2.pdfAcmeApp_redesign_phase1.pdfAcmeApp_extra_wireframes.pdfFinchLabs_workshop_invoice.pdf- …and many more
None of this felt like a problem—until the first time he realized he had under-billed a client by several hundred dollars simply because one small invoice never got sent.
The Pain Point: End-of-Month Confusion
Brian’s routine at the end of each month was the same:
- Open his email and search “invoice” + client name.
- Check which payments had come through on Stripe and bank statements.
- Cross-reference with a rough spreadsheet of expected income.
- Try to remember whether that “quick tweak” had ever made it into an invoice.
For one major client, Studio North, he discovered three separate invoices in three email threads. One had been paid. One was still pending approval. One had never been sent at all.
“If I’m losing track of my own paperwork,” he thought, “it’s not shocking that clients are confused too.”
Reframing the Problem: Make It Easy to Say Yes to Paying
Instead of continuing to send small invoices one by one, Brian decided to behave like a small agency would: one clear, consolidated statement per client per month.
He needed a way to take the scattered invoice PDFs he already had and combine them into a single document. No redesigning, no rebuilding—just a clean stack that told a simple story: “Here’s exactly what I did for you this month, and what you owe.”
He went to https://pdfmigo.com, dragged in all the individual invoice PDFs for a single client, and watched them appear as thumbnail pages.
Suddenly, his month of work looked like a packet instead of a mess.
The Solution: One Monthly Packet Per Client
For each client, Brian followed a simple pattern:
- Gather all draft and sent invoices for that client for the month.
- Drop them into the browser-based tool.
- Arrange them in chronological order (earliest work first, newest last).
- Insert a simple cover page summarizing total hours and total amount due.
When he was done arranging pages, he clicked Merge PDF and downloaded a single document named like: StudioNorth_InvoicePack_2025-03.pdf.
That one file went to the client’s accounting contact. No follow-up attachments. No “Oh, I forgot to include the extra round of revisions.”
Results: Less Chasing, More Designing
After three months of sending consolidated invoice packets, Brian noticed several concrete changes:
- Faster payments. Clients’ finance departments processed one document more quickly than multiple small ones.
- Fewer disputes. All work items were visible in one place, with dates and descriptions intact.
- Cleaner records. At tax time, Brian simply forwarded each monthly packet to his accountant instead of a folder of fragments.
- More headspace. He spent less time wondering, “Did I bill for that?” and more time working on better design.
Most importantly, he stopped leaving money on the table. The invoices he used to forget—or feel awkward charging for—were now quietly, clearly documented in the monthly summary.
What Other Freelancers Can Borrow From Brian’s System
Brian’s process isn’t complicated, and that’s the point. Many freelancers already have the right pieces: invoices, timesheets, and payment records. The missing link is how those pieces are presented.
By turning “a bunch of PDFs” into “one monthly packet per client,” he made it easier for busy people on the other side of the email chain to say yes, approve the invoice, and move on.
For a solo designer trying to make freelance life sustainable, that small structural change—backed by one simple merged PDF— quietly becomes part of the difference between scraping by and running a real business.