Invoicing helps your business get paid for the work you and your team do. No matter if you bill before or after you complete the work, there are things that you can do to improve your invoicing. There are always consistent tweaks that you can make, but here are 5 things you can do now to improve your billing.
A great start to top-quality invoicing is truly understanding your profitability. If you understand your real costs you can ensure that your business is billing correctly for the time and parts actually uses.
When you know your real project costs, you can also ensure that your quotes and estimates are more accurate in the future to produce a better overall billing experience for your clients.
Learn more: Why Tracking Project Margins Matter
How long does invoicing take your team? When you utilise templates to help you generate invoices, it means that you can save heaps of time and get invoicing done faster. It also means that your invoices will be more consistent for your customers.
Using WorkGuru.io, you can create templates that pull details from your projects. So, you can create, preview and send an invoice to your customers in a matter of seconds.
When you work on large projects, it might help both your’s and your customer’s cash flow to bill in phases, or split invoices over a set period. Having tools that help you monitor how much has been invoiced for vs work done can help you to manage your billing more easily.
Having the option to choose to bill for phase, or for a percentage of the total helps you better serve your customers and be flexible to their needs. Depending on the value of your projects, it might even be a deciding factor between your business and a competitor to offer better billing options.
Invoices should make it easy for customers to know what you're asking for immediately. The receiving person should be able to quickly see your credit terms, what’s owed, what’s been done and how to pay.
One way to make it easier for your end-users, and your administration team, is to group your invoices together. That way, if a customer has multiple projects with your business, they still only get one invoice that is easy for them to track and pay.
As part of making it easier for your customers to interact with your invoicing, making payment easy can make the difference between getting a payment right away or on the due date. Making it easy to pay can be as simple as adding the options on how to pay on the document. Alternatively, you can add a link to your online payment option that allows them to pay immediately.
Learn more on Xero’s website: How to improve your invoicing process