Running a business means wearing many hats together to run it smoothly and one of the most important and tedious ones is to manage finances. Initially, when you have few clients, it can be done in excel or spreadsheets but what about the time when your business starts gaining momentum. To be prepared, for such times or to be ever ready for tax submissions, or to have a better assessment of cash inflows and monitor the financial health of your business, you need a good secure billing & invoicing system.
Also, every business owner wants to be on the top, and for that businesses should update themselves with advanced digital solutions. In today’s competitive market, investing in modern and advanced technology in your business operations is one of the best ways to move ahead of other competitors.
Billing & Invoicing System / Software
The billing & invoicing software replaces the manual work and brings more efficiency to the business’ work. It helps in automatically creating or generating bills / professional invoices for the sold or supplied product and services. Further, invoices can be customized professionally with your company’s logo, name, contents, etc. Also, in the invoicing software, the list of products and services with their related costs, including taxes can be saved. So, each generated invoice will show the actual total cost that the client needs to pay and from there itself the invoices can be delivered directly to the client, which saves your time and effort.
So, the invoicing applications help businesses keep track of bill payments, record finances, track cash inflow, process payments faster, etc. It also provides different online payment options to clients.
Signs your Business Need Billing & Invoicing System
Here are a few signs that your business should quit all the traditional methods of billing and invoicing and needs billing and invoicing software:-
1. Spending more time on invoicing than on your business
After being in operation for a few months, when your business picks up and you have a big client list, then spending time creating and managing invoices in Excel or spreadsheet will not be left to an hour but a few hours or say a day. So, a lot of your time will be spent on creating and sending invoices to your growing client base, instead of focusing on growing and improving your venture.
To manage time, businesses need to opt a good billing and invoicing software, which can help you focus on the main business matters rather than spending most of your time on maintaining invoices and bills.
2. Growing accounts receivable
As the business grows, so does the accounts receivable, and so does the pressure on the business to collect those payments. Now imagine all your client’s data in excel or a spreadsheet, and you are trying to calculate and keep track of all the debtors. Isn’t that thought scary? It surely is. So, here comes for help a good billing and invoicing software. We suggest you opt for one stop invoicing software, which is cost-effective and it provides various several features.
3. Easier way to create and deliver payment reminders
With time, in businesses, the client’s list increases and so does the list of late payers. The reason for late payers can be either people are forgetful, have misplaced invoices, or have unintentionally deleted emailed invoices.
And, if you manually track these clients, their outstanding invoices, and send payment reminders to them, the whole process will be tedious. So, the best option is to send automatic payment reminders and this can be done best with the use of invoicing software. In this software, you do not have to lift a finger. You just need to schedule the time for a reminder and you are done. It is a great way to minimize late payers and get your hands on the money you had worked hard to make.
4. You don’t know the real-time status of invoices or revenue
Many businesses wait until the end of the day, week, or pay period to collect work order info and process invoices. As a business owner, you should have real-time reports of all this.
And if you ask your accountant to pull these reports that are just a few weeks behind just to get an estimate of current revenue, then they will take too much time to create and send those reports whereas invoicing system shows you the real-time status.
5. Looking for an easy way to track finances and create business reports
As business gain momentum, paperwork grows along with it and so does the work to track finances and create business reports. You might have to enter and reenter duplicate data across multiple software platforms to generate financial reports for your business.
Whereas if you have billing and invoicing software, it will make your work easier by tracking the invoices and creating the business records automatically.
6. Invoicing System can be integrated with other business tools
One thing that doesn’t cross people’s minds when they think about invoicing software is the ability to integrate invoicing with other business tools. What I’m talking about here is additional multitasking to enhance the performance of your business. One stop offers integration, which in turn paves the way to thousands of other business tool integrations.
7. You need to keep track of your inventory more efficiently
With small operations, it is easy to manually track inventory. But, as your purchase and sale increases, the manual system becomes inefficient. Instead, you should find a way to store and update inventory data in a real-time system.
Many accounting software comes with built-in inventory management features that let you record descriptions of each product in your store and automatically update your inventory every time you log a sale.
8. You need faster access to information
The main advantage of working on a cloud-based invoicing system is that you can automatically generate data. Instead of going through hundreds of spreadsheet rows to reach a conclusion, you can create powerful reports and dashboards with just a few clicks. For instance, if you want to know gross profit for all customers during a certain time, you can pull a customized report on just about every financial transaction your business had. Maybe you need to know what products sell the fastest during a particular month.
Also Read: How online invoicing software can make your life easier
These are a few points, which clearly depict that your business now needs a billing and invoicing system.