Free Financial Today

Tired of issuing your invoices in Microsoft Excel or Word? Looking for an easier way to invoice? Why not investigate a web-based solution or service that is going to help you to create and send quotations and invoices? So let’s get your business invoicing out of the past and shed some 21st century light on it!

Most small company owners and freelancers are familiar with manually making invoices, but most of us are all too aware of the pitfalls of manual invoicing:

- Time consuming: Manual billing can be time intensive work and often leads to hours of redundant alterations to templates in Excel or Word.

- Capturing similar details over and over again: Creating invoices yourself in Excel or Word mostly means that the product names or item descriptions you use are not easily reachable and have to be retyped or copy/pasted on a repetitive basis, wasting precious man hours.

- Time consuming: Businesses using Excel or Word for manual billing will be very familiar to duplicating line items and writing out product and service descriptions on each and every new invoice they create.

- Manual sending: Invoices created in Excel or Word need to be manually sent to your customer either via email or snail mail. Sending via email mostly means saving the quote or invoice a PDF and manually attaching each quote or invoice individually to an email and physically sending it off to your customer. This can result in wrong email recipients and attachments or clients not receiving invoices as the attachment size causes emails to be sent to the customers spam box.

- Is your data secure? Storing all your invoices and quotes on a single PC can result in everything being stolen when your PC crashes or gets lost. Safety on your office PC is also only as good as the anti-virus program you can afford; often times leaving your data open to being accessed by unauthorized personnel.

- Client information integrity and safety: This method of keeping invoices on 1 PC also has serious drawbacks when it comes to customer data security and backups. If your PC is stolen or crashes you lose all your data!

What I have described above can only be categorized as problems the small business owner of the 90′s faced, but in all honesty and quite surprisingly what I mentioned here is really pretty familiar to a very large portion of the SME and freelancer invoicing market today! Shocking? Yes. True? Absolutely! Is there a better way? Most certainly!

The solution: An online billing service

Discovering a web-based invoicing software solution for your business is one of the simplest things you can do. It also has one of the biggest impacts on your companies success. Simply starting by completing an online search for an online billing or invoicing software solution, review and compare and you could be well on your way to better invoicing within a matter of minutes.

Benefits of online invoicing:

- Online billing means saved time and cash in your bank. By utilizing a web-based invoicing software as opposed to using Excel or Word you can save a minimum of 10 hours a week on your normal business invoicing.

- Human mistakes are mostly eliminated. As online invoicing systems have built in fail-safe’s that stop duplication of data or accidental removal of sensitive information.

- Web-based billing systems usually automate everything for you. Because most web-based billing software solutions use standardized templates and line items all you need to do is enter them once and you never have to re-enter them again.

- Online billing prevents the need for your businesses employees to manually post invoices to clients via email. A professional system will allow you to setup invoice times and then do all the work on your behalf. Making the invoice, changing it to PDF and then mailing an html invoice with PDF attachment to your client.

- So the problem with old invoicing methods was that you could only access your data from one point eg. Your work pc. Not anymore! Online billing means your data is saved on the web, so you can get to it from any web-enabled device. So you can mail invoices from your phone on the golf course or process a payment from your laptop on the train.

- Most online billing systems store your data securely on your behalf so you get the advantage of big business security without having to support the cost of the infrastructure yourself. Most good online invoicing systems also backup your data on your behalf. Some as regularly as every 15 minutes. So even if your laptop gets forgotten on the plane or your office PC has a meltdown you will NEVER lose any invoicing data.

Let’s get your business into the 21st century and stop you doing all your quotations and invoices by hand. We say get on the internet and start looking for an online billing solution right now.

Before you decide on an online billing system, make sure you check Susan Bapsnill’ suggested online invoicing software and recurring billing system software solutions.. Free reprint available from: Start creating invoices on the internet.