It is Time to Upgrade from Invoicing to E-voicing

Invoicing is a necessary but all-too-tedious part of all businesses. Manual invoicing leads to a number of problems — they’re time-consuming, there’s no way to know when your vendors receive or view them, there’s no way to automatically track them, etc.

Manual invoicing is actually completely outdated and has too many weaknesses to name. If you’re still using this manual invoicing system, you’re likely spending a lot of resources chasing after invoices and manually logging them, time that can be better spent at productive tasks.

In this article, we give you an overview of some of the prime drawbacks of invoicing and the reasons why you need to upgrade to e-voicing immediately.

Drawbacks of Invoicing

The following are some of the primary reasons why you need to ditch the outdated process of manual invoicing immediately.

1. Time-Consuming

If you follow a manual invoicing process, it takes a lot of time to create and send out invoices and it can take days or weeks to approve them. You have to hire team members whose specific tasks involve processing invoices — a task that’s completely unproductive. This means you have to divert attention away from significant productive tasks and spend more hours on invoicing. This can prove to be extremely expensive in terms of opportunity cost.

2. Loss of Money

Manual invoice processing is an extremely tedious and confusing task. You may lose money because of several issues like duplicate payments, late penalties, frauds, missing documents, overpayments, and other similar issues. All of these issues are commonplace when then invoicing process isn’t centralized and automated. These errors are impossible to avoid due to human error and they can be really expensive.

3. Hassle

Generally speaking, an invoicing process can be a real hassle because of the stages involved. After you receive an invoice, it has to be printed, registered into an accounting system, information has to be extracted, you have to match details with other invoices, send it to other relevant departments, verify information, and handle a number of other processes. All of this delays the invoice processing considerably and proves to be a huge hassle with a lot of redundancies along the way.

4. Human Resources

Invoice processing requires a lot of human resources because they have to be processed manually. You have to hire specific team members for this task alone — team members that you have to pay. As such, the very act of processing payments is expensive in itself.

5. Lack of Accountability

Manual invoices can’t be automatically tracked. If you had the correct set of tracking infrastructure, you’d be able to identify redundancies in the process, remove issues, track incoming invoices, etc. When you’re invoicing manually, there’s no such accountability.

Other Drawbacks

In addition to the aforementioned primary drawbacks of invoicing, you also have the following issues to contend with:

Invoicing is an extremely boring process.
It’s an antiquated way of processing invoices.
You’re vulnerable to miscommunications and redundancies.
Invoice information is hard to track at a moment’s notice.
It impedes progress and development.
It’s extremely exhausting to prepare financial reports for taxes, audits, and other such purposes.
You’re left vulnerable to security risks and threats.

E-Voicing: A Better Way to Do Things

E-Voicing or electronic invoicing is the process of sending digital invoices to clients. These invoices are either sent once or periodically based on a set of automation.

If your company depends on processing a vast number of invoices on a regular basis, then e-voicing can massively increase your productivity. The information contained in the invoice is the same as a traditional invoice, it’s merely present in a digital or online space.

The following are some of the main reasons your firm can benefit from incorporating e-voicing solutions.

1. Mobility and Universal Accessibility

E-voicing allows you to handle data entry processes from anywhere in the world. You can communicate, collaborate, administer, and handle all other business tasks from wherever you want as long as you’re connected via a digital highway. With e-voicing, you can handle all invoice management tasks from anywhere in the world using your mobile, tablet, or laptop.

Furthermore, e-voicing solutions can also be automated. That means you don’t have to manually collect invoicing information, verify it, log all the data, and mail them out. You don’t even have to hire a team to handle processing. This saves you immense time and money in terms of human resources. Now, you can simply use an e-voicing solution to enter certain invoicing conditions and schedule them.

2. Efficient Cash Flow

With manual invoicing, weeks or months may pass by between completing a task, processing the invoice, and receiving or sending payments. This can lead to a bottleneck effect wherein you have too many invoices coming in or going out and you can’t handle all of them. Delayed payments also mean your vendors may quit or stop working.

E-voicing allows you to handle all of the invoice processing and creation immediately from your mobile device. In some cases, you don’t even have to do it all on your own because you’ve simply scheduled the invoice. If you’re receiving digital e-voices, you can clear them out immediately so there’s no backlog. If you’re sending e-voices, you can schedule and send them in an immediately tracked format that can be instantly cleared.

In some cases, e-voicing also facilitates immediate payment so your clients can make the payment with a few clicks. This turns cash flow into an extremely smooth and immediate process and there’s no backlog in need of tracking.

3. Increased Productivity

As you can tell from the previous points, e-voicing makes it extremely easy to create and process invoices, even if you’re not at work. These details can also be entered into web-based cloud systems easily. Since you drastically cut down the time necessary for processing and verifying invoices, you can focus on more productive tasks.

You don’t need to hire special human resources for the task of invoice processing alone and your employees can focus on tasks that actually bring income. In the long run, e-voicing can drastically increase your productivity, which, in turn, increases your overall turnover as well.

4. Eco-Friendly

Manual invoicing is an extremely paper-intensive process. You have to use copious amounts of paper, which is simply wasteful when a far more efficient alternative is available. With e-voicing, you don’t have to print a single piece of paper, drastically cutting down your organization’s paper usage and carbon footprint. As such, electronic invoicing can turn you into a greener company.

5. Security and Tracking

Manual invoices are unsafe and hard to track. Since they are maintained on paper, anyone can find them and gain access to all of your private company transactions. Furthermore, regardless of how you organize or file them, retrieving the information can be an extremely time-consuming process. You have to track the invoice according to clients, date, or year from a massive shelf of files.

With e-voicing, you can store your invoices on the cloud to get rid of both those issues. If the invoices are in the cloud, other people can’t get access to them and you can’t misplace them. Furthermore, with e-voicing you can also easily track all of your invoices based on time, clients, or any other keywords. Instead of rifling through dozens and hundreds of invoices, you can simply enter the keywords and retrieve them.

Conclusion

If you still use manual invoices, it’s high time you adopt e-voicing as an efficient solution. It will drastically improve your productivity and increase your bottom line.