Saturday, 28 January 2012

Stop wasting time and your cash; bill one the Internet

By Susan Bapsnill


Tired of creating your invoices in Microsoft Excel or Word? Searching for a better way to invoice? Why not investigate an online tool or service that is going to help you to make and issue quotations and invoices? So let's get your business billing out of the past and shed some 21st century light on it!

Most small company owners and freelancers are familiar with manually creating invoices, but most of us are all too aware of the downside of manual invoicing:

- Resource intensive: If you need to make and issue invoices manually you need to set aside at least fifteen hours a week to do this. Your business also require more employees to handle the work.

- Mistakes happen easily: An accounting nightmare, duplicated invoices and skipped or missing invoice numbers! This can very easily happen when billing manually, often leading to hours of work trying to resolve the error.

- Time consuming: Those using Excel or Word for manual invoicing will be very familiar to copy and pasting line items and writing out product and service descriptions on each and every new invoice they make.

- Emailing quotations and invoices: Issuing invoices to customers manually opens a Pandora's box of possible problems. Problems making invoices to a small enough send-able format like PDF can cause problems. This also introduces the possibility of emails being retruned due to attachment size or the client not being able to see the invoice correctly.

- Data storage: Creating invoices and quotations this way normally means that you store your invoice and quotation archive on a computer at your home or office. You therefore cannot locate client billing records when you are not at that computer. If your work requires you to be mobile then this will always reduce your productivity and ability to provide quick customer service with relation to invoicing queries.

- Data security and backups: Storing all your invoices and quotations on one computer also means that data is only as secure as the software you install to protect it. This often times leaves sensitive billing information available to the prying eyes of unauthorized users. Most small business owners do sporadically backup this data on external storage devices, but this type of backup needs to be done very frequently, else you risk losing all your data if your computer crashes or gets stolen.

This kind of thing may lead you to ask why anyone would still be using these outdated procedures to invoice to their clients. You will therefore be surprised to hear that a large portion of freelancers and small business owners still apply these outdated business billing principles to their invoicing today. Little do they know that clean, safe, backed-up modern invoicing is only a few clicks away. And that this way of billing won't cost you an arm and a leg.

The way forward: Online billing

Finding a tool that's going to help you make quotations and invoices on the web is easy. There are many out there and it is easy to find a quality solution that will not cost you an arm or a leg.

Benefits of online invoicing:

- As web-based billing is automated you will save hours you would have spent on invoicing each month. Because you don't need to do so much manual billing you can also employ less personnel.

- No more human problems, duplications or mistakes. An online service eradicates these almost entirely as they have built-in fail safes to avoid this.

- Automate don't duplicate. No longer will you need to perform the same procedure more than once. Invoicing systems use standard templates and line items that you enter once and re-use as desired.

- Gone are the days that you need to manually send invoices to customers. Most great billing services come with the ability to schedule the automatic issuing of invoices. No more converting invoices to PDF manually either - most great online billing software solutions issue the invoices you schedule in html and PDF format.

- So the problem with old invoicing procedures was that you could only get to your client information from one point for example: Your office pc. Not anymore! Online billing means your data is saved online, so you can get to it from any web-enabled device. So you can send invoices from your tablet on the golf course or process a payment from your laptop on the train.

- Most online invoicing software store your data securely on your behalf so you get the benefit of big company security without having to support the cost of the infrastructure yourself. Most good online billing software also backup your data on your behalf. Some as often as every 15 minutes. So even if your laptop gets forgotten on the plane or your office PC has a breakdown you will NEVER lose any billing information.

So why not move out of the time-consuming, tedious past and say hello to the cloud hosted and completely automated future. Get on the web and look for an online invoicing system today!




About the Author:



No comments:

Post a Comment