Sick and tired of creating invoices manually in Excel or Word? So you want to locate a system or a tool that is going to assist you fashion invoices on the web? Now is certainly the time to move out of the 90’s and move your companies invoicing into the 21st century.
Most small company owners and freelancers are familiar with manually creating invoices, however many of us are all too aware of the pitfalls of manual billing:
– Time consuming: Manual billing can be time intensive work and many times results in hours of redundant alterations to templates in Excel or Word.
– Human mistakes: Altering information manually leaves your billing susceptible to human mistakes. E.g. Mistakes in your invoice or quote number sequence may result in duplicate or missed invoice numbers – an accounting nightmare!
– Redundancy: Having to rewrite or copy/paste line item text and service descriptions each time you complete a quote or invoice is also an un-necessary duplication resulting in lost time. Leaving your invoices subject to spelling mistakes and wrong or mismatched product descriptions.
– Manual sending: Invoices created in Excel or Word need to be manually sent to your customer either via email or postal mail. Sending via email mostly means storing the quote or invoice a PDF and manually attaching each quote or invoice individually to an email and physically sending it off to your customer. This can result in wrong email recipients and attachments or customers not receiving invoices as the attachment size results in emails to be delivered to the customers spam box.
– 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 customer billing data when you are not at that computer. If your work needs you to be on the move then this will always reduce your productivity and ability to provide quick customer support 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 safe as the software you have in place to protect it. This many times leaves sensitive billing information available to the prying eyes of unauthorized users. Most small company owners do haphazardly backup this data on external hard-drives, but this type of backup requires to be done very regularly, else you risk losing all your data if your computer crashes or gets stolen.
What I have explained above can only be categorized as problems the small company owner of the 90’s faced, but in all honesty and quite surprisingly what I described here is really pretty familiar to a very large segment of the SME and freelancer invoicing market today! Shocking? Yes. True? Absolutely! Is there a better way? Most definitely!
The solution: Billing on the web
Locating a tool that’s going to assist you make quotations and invoices on the web is easy. There are many out there and it is easy to find a great solution that will not cost you an arm or a leg.
Benefits of online billing:
– Online invoicing saves you time. As most tasks performed in online invoicing software can be highly automated you don’t have to spend hours performing redundant tasks or employ many staff members to do this for you.
– Human mistakes are mostly eliminated. As online invoicing software have a built in fail-safe that stop duplication of data or accidental removal of sensitive information.
– Automation is online billing’s solution to duplication. The majority of tasks can be automated by an online invoicing system. This means you create standardized templates and invoice line items once and never have to re-enter them again. The software will do it all for you.
– Online billing software can send invoices for you via email. You can schedule a time and a date when invoices need to be sent and then sit back and watch as the software automatically sends HTML and PDF format invoices to customers at your command.
– A quality invoicing system will ensure that data is stored securely on the web. This means it is reachable from any web-enabled device at any time and from any location. Perfect for a small company owner with an active lifestyle.
– Most online billing software store your data securely on your behalf so you get the advantage of big company security without the need to support the cost of the infrastructure yourself. Most quality online billing software also backup your data on your behalf. Some as regularly as every 15 minutes. So even if your laptop gets forgotten on the plane or your office computer has a breakdown you will NEVER lose any invoicing 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 now!
