Thursday, April 11, 2013

Stop wasting time and money; bill online

By Susan Bapsnill


Sick and tired of creating invoices manually in Microsoft Excel or Word? So you want to find a system or a tool that is going to help you fashion invoices on the web? Now is certainly the time to get out of the 90's and move your businesses invoicing into the 21st century.

We all know that creating invoices and quotes manually can be very time consuming and also technically demanding. Do any of the following manual invoicing related issues sound recognizable to you?

- Mistakes can be made: Un-automated billing leaves your invoices open to errors. Leaving out a quote number or duplication an invoice can be disasterousl to your company's audit.

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

- Sending your invoices to clients: Sending each invoice or quotation manually can take very long and ends in invoices sometimes not reaching their desired recipients or emails being mailed with a wrong invoice attached or worse still, without attachments.

- Backups: If your business create invoices yourself you probably store them on one work PC. This means invoices can't be looked at when you are away from this computer, limiting your mobility and ability to deliver quick client service with billing queries.

- Is your businesses data secure? Storing all your invoices and quotes on one computer can result in it all being lost when your PC crashes or gets lost. Safety on your work PC is also only as effective as the anti-virus program you get; often times leaving your information open to being accessed by unauthorized people.

- Data security and backups: Storing all your invoices and quotations on one PC also means that data is only as secure as the software you install to protect it. This many times leaves sensitive billing data available to the prying eyes of unauthorized users. Most small company owners do sporadically backup this data on external storage devices, but this type of backup requires to be done very regularly, else you risk losing all your data if your PC 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 billing market today! Shocking? Yes. True? Absolutely! Is there a better way? Most definitely!

The path the future: Online invoicing

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 quality solution that will not cost you an arm or a leg.

Benefits of doing web-based invoicing:

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

- Built in preventative measures mean that web-based billing systems won't let you to duplicate or skip an invoice number. Employee actions can be recorded and any human error corrected or prevented. Great news if your new assistant has ever accidentally saved over your entire database of saved billing information.

- Automate do not duplicate. No longer will you need to perform the same task more than once. Billing solutions use default templates and line items that you input once and re-use as desired.

- Gone are the times that you need to manually email quotes to customers. Most good invoicing services come with the ability to time the automatic issuing of invoices. No more converting invoices to PDF manually either - most outstanding online invoicing software solutions issue the invoices you schedule in HTML and PDF format.

- So the trouble with old fashioned billing methods was that you could only access your data from 1 point eg. Your office computer. Not anymore! Online invoicing means your information is stored on the web, so you can get to it from any internet enabled device. So you can send invoices from your iPhone at the hairdressers or process a payment from your laptop on the train.

- Great online billing systems run real-time backups of your information and have tough security procedures in place meaning your data is always safe. Never again will you lose any client data due to a lost laptop or crashed PC.

Now is the time to start doing something! Get started now. It is simple. Anyone can do it. Get on the internet and start searching for an online invoicing or billing software solution that going to get you invoicing the 21st century way.




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