Technology investment is definitely on the top priority list for most of CFOs and CEOs of top notch companies across the verticals. It is not so different with small and medium scale enterprises (SME s) as well. Apart from technology investment to make processes more efficient and accurate, management of these organizations are also trying to use the technology to automate all the basic and the low skill needed jobs.
Basics of invoicing:
One such job in any type of business is invoicing. One can easily make use of efficient invoicing software to automate this process. However, people are shying away from the invoicing software for reasons that can not be explained in proper way. According to a recent survey conducted by a top notch market research firm, between 60 % – 70 % of invoices that are being generated across the businesses of all industries are still being processed manually. They are not using any invoicing software.
Myths on invoicing software:
Most of these organizations are not really showing tendency to come out of these manual invoicing systems. They claim that the actual costs goes up as these invoicing software involve several costs like procuring cost of the invoicing software, customization costs so that it is customized according to the needs of that particular business, implementation costs of the software, training costs for the users, maintenance costs and up gradation costs in the future. However, the realty about the costs involved in the invoicing software is entirely different.
Hindrances with traditional, manual systems:
With the conventional and traditional manual invoicing system, hundreds some times even thousands of invoices have to be reviewed and entered on to a external accounting system. This process involves massive cost in terms of time, personnel, other resources and some times you run a huge risk of errors in the manual system.
Hence, it is quite clear that the usage of invoicing software is definitely cost effective when compared with the manual invoicing systems. Now, let us have a look at some really key features that stand out when you make use of invoicing software in place of traditional, conventional and manual system.
Basics of automated process:
Any solution of invoicing processing will involve a special software module designed for the automation and easy usage of the invoicing. This will allow the process of invoicing to be speeded up in a quite massive manner. This will have a prominent impact on reducing accounts admin costs associated with invoice processing and also enables companies to make best use of any time critical payment times which may attract supplier discounts.
Basics features of invoicing software:
Most of the invoicing software allows a wide range of generic invoices to be scanned simultaneously. This will also facilitate automatic reconciliation against the original purchase order. This may not involve any manual data entry or if involved it will be very minimal. The software uses the technique of Optical Character Recognition or OCR along with data matching algorithms for this purpose. This will provide companies with a very great advantage in the generic invoicing section.
Features of good invoice software for any business:
Hence any good invoicing software should be able to automatically scan, extract and validate all the data related to the invoice. More over it should be able to feed that data directly to the appropriate accounting system of that business. It should be able to generate automated invoices in multiple formats, styles, layouts. They can be pure handwritten or machine printed, single page or multiple pages, colored or black and white paper, and may also come from same geographic region or from abroad. Because, each supplier will have his own style of invoicing and our software should be able to deal with this.
Advanced features of invoice software:
The invoicing software should also have the ability to get easily integrated with the other parts of the automated business. It should get embed quite easily with the entire digitized process of the organization. So, good and efficient invoicing software should be able to provide with interfaces to ERP products (Enterprise Resource Planning), CRM products (Customer Relationship Management), Payment Gateways (Like Pay Pal, Credit Card Gateways), Document Managements and even electronic Content Management modules. If the software that you choose for the automation of invoicing in your organization is capable of these advanced integration features, then it should increase the efficiency of the over all process of your business.
By taking into consideration all the above stated benefits and usages of invoicing software; one should for the best possible invoice software for the business at his budget.
