Digital invoicing is the delivery and payment of invoices for your business using electronic systems that allow customers to view and pay their invoices online using any internet connected device.
The introduction of digital invoicing has changed the way people pay for goods in the home and its now becoming the norm that customers want to pay using their mobile device and receive electronic confirmation of the transaction.
When we look at the trends in business today we see an increasing number of small business turning to digital invoicing (also called electronic invoicing) as it provides a more reliable and time efficient business model and increases customer satisfaction.
Here are some compelling reasons to move to electronic invoices.
1. Improve Your Efficiency
Manually creating ad sending invoices is very time consuming and if yo have a business that tends to send a larger number of small invoices, the cost and time associated with invoicing will probably be disproportionately high. To improve your business efficiency and reduce low value effort then you need to start sending digital invoices as soon as possible. You need to create the invoice, ensure its accuracy, print it, send it to the buyer, wait until the payment is made, and, then, enter the payment into your servers. E-invoicing, on the other hand, bypasses the hassle associated with traditional invoicing.
Check out your options for sending digital invoices, but also consider the bigger picture associated with repeat custom and referral marketing. So be sure to choose a product that’s both cost effective and increases your business traction. By leveraging an existing marketplace like Nubilo you can save time sending great looking digital invoices and at the same time increase your customer reach, referrals and gain insightful feedback from every customer transaction. You can also automatically remediate payments, follow up on overdue invoices and track your income with a simple to use dashboard.
2. Reduce Business Costs
Keeping your business costs to a minimum is an important way to maximise profits and ensure that you get the most out of your business. The cost of printing and mailing paper invoices, and the cost of time to mange them can be a slow death for a business with lots of small transactions, such as a window cleaner or servicing business. It’s important to use a tool that helps you get paid faster but costs you less.
Analyse how much time you are spending each week producing invoices and if its more than an hour, then you aught to think about invoice automation and using digital invoices to reduce costs and improve efficiency.
There are plenty of electronic invoice tools out there in the market. But we recommend finding one that tracks you payments, automatically sends follow ups for later payments and one that includes a customisable customer portal that gives your customers a single pane of glass to see their spending history, mange payments and order more services. Nubilo does all this for you. Check out our invoicing tools here: https://www.nubilo.co.uk/businessDemo/?page=manageinvoices
3. Avoiding Errors
Any task done by hand can be prone to errors, and that also applies to creating invoices by hand. Inputting the correct customer details and job specifications are not only time consuming but also prone to error.
Traditional invoices require a lot of data entry and In addition to being very time and effort consuming, this process gives a large room for human error. Switching to e-invoicing is the best solution to prevent any human errors, with the added advantage of being more efficient.
Be sure to choose an electronic system that is tied to a Customer Relationship Management system to keep a catalogue of your customer names and addresses and job history. This will allow you to save time with inputting your customer data by automatically inputting the customer information from a database. You could use mail merge tools and excel to do this, but it starts to get complicated very quickly, so we recommend a dedicate Customer Management and invoicing systems that is designed for the job.
4. Improved payment Tracking and Reporting
A huge benefit of electronic invoices is that they give you the ability to access from anywhere, using any of your smart devices.
You get to track the status of the invoice, with some types of software even enabling you to know when your buyer has opened the invoice. You’ll receive the payment as soon as it’s been made, and you’ll be able to generate reports and analytics about your finances periodically.
All of these features allow you to continue to develop and optimise your business. Helping you get paid faster and more efficiently and allowing you to produce customised reports that show if you are successful in achieving your targets for growth and income.
Keeping track of invoices and knowing if some of your customers are not paying your promptly is also an important way to know who your good customer are and who might be bad customers. Nubilo not only tracks your invoice payments and automatically remediates your payments against the invoice, but also provides you a payment speed indicator that helps you understand if a customer is paying you promptly or is repeatedly slow to pay you., This can help you make decisions on commitments you are making to bad paying customers.
5. Identify Cross Selling Opportunities
Many of your customers will buy some of your products but may not always be aware of the range of service you provide and so you could be missing out on opportunities to get additional work from many of your customers.
The invoice is a correspondence that your customers are expecting to have, and they will often keep a copy in their files. This makes the invoice a great platform for warm marketing by gently making your customers aware of your additional services. One way to do this is to show a list of your services at the bottom and highlight which ones your customer has used, thereby showing which services they are not utilising.
Cross selling by offering promotions for your other services within the invoice is also a great way of getting additional revenue and increasing the value of each of your customers.
Electronic invoices are a great platform for cross selling as you can provide images and links to your additional services and offer immediate discounts if your customer refers you or reorders from you.
Nubilo offer some fantastic tools for electronic invoicing and cross selling comes as standard. Check out our invoicing tools here https://www.nubilo.co.uk/businessDemo/?page=manageinvoices
Knowing what products or services your customers sell is a powerful insight in increasing sales and cross selling. Using an electron invoicing tool that is linked to a Customer Relationship Database (CRM) is the simplest way to gather information about your customer sales and identify opportunities. Nubilo has a customer dashboard that shows which services they are consuming along with insights on their engagement level and payment behaviours that could allow you to greatly increase cross selling opportunities and grow your business with your existing customer base.
Check out our business feature demo https://www.nubilo.co.uk/businessDemo/?page=viewcustomer
6. Reconcile Accounts
As a small business, you know that the reconciliation of your customers’ invoices is one of the biggest struggles you face.
Customers don’t always pay invoices on time, or occasionally they will pay several invoices at once, and if they don’t pay in full it can be difficult to reconcile the payments against an individual invoice. Customers can complain about damaged goods, quality or speed and choose to withhold partial payment, so its useful to have a system that that gives them less options for creating confusion.
With an e-invoice system, you’ll have a single place from which you can monitor every customer, along with their payment and transaction history. It can save you hours every week trying to figure out which invoices have been paid and which are overdue. Having a mature invoicing system increases your efficiency and customer service which builds trust with your customers and increases repeat sales.
7. Reduced Carbon Footprint
Electronic invoicing is one of the best ways to eliminate waste and improve the environmental impact of your business.
Printing, carriage and waste disposal all burn carbon through the production of paper and fuel used to transport your materials and posted invoices.
All the printing, papers, and resources that go into creating the invoice will be eliminated, which directly translates into a reduced carbon footprint.
Summary
The switch to electronic invoicing is one of the growing trends for all small businesses for good reasons. Not only does it provide your business with a more efficient and cost-effective way to operate, but it also gives you better control of your invoices and leverage more sales from your customers. Furthermore, it enables you to reconcile your accounts better, delivering better customer service in the process.
I hope you enjoyed this Article. There are loads more like it to come as we follow the development of Nubilo.
Nubilo is a “Home Services Marketplace” where you can manage your home or develop your home services business. Nubilo provides Property Asset Management tools for simplifying the management of your home, and Business Management tools to help small businesses grow.
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