Accounting Software: Electronic Invoices

Do Away with Snail Mail and Stay Current
Getting into a habit and having a specific system by which you do things is a great way to stay organized and on top of a situation. However, there comes a point where manual work is just too much to really make it practical.

This is especially true of your accounting and billing processes. In fact, manual tracking of invoices and billing customers can be time consuming, bulky, and expensive. The postal service keeps raising postage rates, and you keep adding customers to your list of accounts receivable, making the use of snail mail inefficient financially as well as in terms of speed. Instead of taking this road, you can very easily convert to electronic invoices and save time and money.

We live in a world of technology, where everyone has a fax machine, email, or both, and most businesses cannot function without one or the other, at least. Manual billing and hard copy paper printouts are bulky and can be difficult to keep track of with all the junk mail received. By sending electronic invoices, you can rest assured that there is a track record showing the issue of the billing document, and you can always forward another copy without incurring great cost. Best of all, you don’t have to hassle with the mess of printing out, folding, and stuffing documents into envelopes that then must be licked, sealed, addressed, and stamped. Obviously, aside from saving money, it also saves time.

On top of these advantages, electronic invoices bring you up to the 21st century, during which people are more likely to check their email than sort through their snail mail. That means you’ll have a quicker response to electronic invoices than paper bills. Invoicing by this means also helps you maintain a more organized accounting process, creating a way to see when an invoice went out without having to print a second copy and file it in a thick file inside an overstuffed filing cabinet. The email you send will be saved in an electronic file on your hard drive that can quickly be indexed through a search on your computer.

By sending an email or a fax, there is no wait on the other end of the transaction to receive the bill; it arrives immediately upon being sent. With snail mail, there is no guarantee of an arrival date, so you can’t be sure when the customer will receive their bill. Electronic invoices can be traced and receipt verified immediately. The sooner a client receives a bill telling them what they owe, the sooner they can include the invoice in their cash flow and get the payment back to you.

As your business grows, it will become more and more difficult to keep up with most manual processes, and you’ll find automating as much as possible essential to the organization and success of your company. By converting to electronic invoices, you are removing a great deal of clutter and difficulty from the processes that are necessary to run a business. With greater clarity, faster service, and better record keeping capability, electronic invoices will streamline your business with ease.