Making invoices manually is laborious, costly work, consuming precious recourses and causing any sane business owner to strive to avoid it. Does any of this sound familiar?

• Resource intensive: If you need to make and send invoices manually you need to set aside at least 15 hours a week to do this. You also require more staff members to handle the workload.
• Mistakes happen easily: An accounting nightmare, duplicated invoices number or skipped or missing invoice numbers! This can very easily happen when invoicing manually often leading to hours of auditing trying to resolve the issue.
• Time consuming: Those using Excel or Word for manual invoicing will be very familiar to copy and pasting line items and typing out product and service descriptions on each and every new invoice they make.  
• Emailing quotes and invoices: Emailing invoices to clients manually opens a Pandora’s box of possible problems. Problems converting invoices to a small enough send-able format like PDF can deliver a smorgasbord of headaches. This also opens up the possibility of emails being rejected due to attachment size or the client not being able to view the invoice correctly.
• Saving your work: Manual invoicing through Excel or Word usually means that you save all your invoices in one folder on one computer. This is problematic as you can only access your invoices from that one computer, so you cannot deal with billing enquires when outside of the office. This delivers a major blow to productivity.
• Data integrity and safety: This method of storing invoices on one pc also has serious drawbacks when it comes to data security and backups. If your pc is stolen or crashes you lose all your data!

You would think that what I have described above does not happen anymore. Why would anyone still want to do their business billing in this way? But surprisingly, if not shockingly most of the scenarios and problems I described above are experienced by many small business owners and freelancers today. So how do we eradicate this billing problem of the past? By stepping into the future – one automated, secure, fully backedup invoice and quote at a time.

The solution: An online billing system

Getting a solution to help you make quotations and invoices on the web is a hassle-free task. If you do a bit a research it is pretty easy to find a high quality, professional system that is not going to cost you that much.

Benefits of online billing:

• Online billing means saved time and money in the bank. By using an online billing system as opposed to using Excel or Word you can save a minimum of 10 hours a week on your regular business billing.
• Built in fail safes mean that online invoicing systems won’t allow you to duplicate or skip an invoice number. Staff actions can be tracked and any human error corrected or prevented. Good news if your new assistant has ever accidentally saved over your entire database of invoices.
• Automate don’t duplicate. No longer will you need to perform the same action more than one. Billing systems use standard templates and line items that you enter once and reuse as desired.
• An online invoicing eliminates the need for you to manually send invoices to clients via email. A quality system will allow you to schedule invoice times and then do all the work for you. Generating the invoice, converting it to PDF and then sending an html invoice with PDF attachment to your client.
• So the problem with old billing methods what that you could only access your data from one point eg. Your office pc. Not anymore! Online invoicing means your data is stored on the web, so you can access it from any web-enabled device. So you can send invoices from your iPhone on the golf course or process a payment from your laptop on the train.
• Get the benefit of big business security without having to support the cost of the big business infrastructure. All quality online invoicing systems have strict security measures in place and most of them run frequent backups on your data on your behalf. So next time your laptop gets stole or your work pc crashes you won’t lose even a stitch of client data. Handy hey?

Let’s get your business into the twenty-first century and stop you having to do all your quotations and invoices manually. We suggest you get on the web and start looking for an online billing system straight away.

Have a look at the points below to see how online sales will work for your business:

No website required

So you think you need to spend money to make money. That is true in a sense, but when it comes to small businesses who want to sell their products and services online you don’t need to spend big bucks to get what you want.

Using a ready hosted online sales system will cut out the need for a pricey website and online shop software, while still giving you great results. Investigate your options and go for an online solution that offers you everything your business needs.

Save time and money with automation

A service like this will enable even the small business owner to start selling his goods and services online. And if you find the right system many of the manual processes you do now can be automated. This could mean an online signup form that send clients an invoice automatically when they order a product or service. Great for saving on the costs of employing tons of administration and accounts staff.

How to make online payment easy

So you want to sell your services online hey? That also means you need to give your customers the ability to pay online. There are a myriad of payment gateways on the market today that allow your clients to pay for the products and services they order online in a secure, hassle-free way. Having an instant credit card payment gateway is a necessity. This can be augmented with a gateway that facilitates wire transfer of funds.

Making use of a payment facilitator to automate recurring billing and sell your services online will really help your small business be more successful. When you sell online you increase your profits without huge capital investment. You also improve your online presence by using a ready hosted payment facilitator and you allow your clients to pay you more easily by giving them the ability to instantly pay online. So what are you waiting for, find an online invoicing system and start selling online.

So, recurring billing, what is it? Recurring will charges an amount more than once to your credit card or bank account. The amount is usually the same and recurs on the same date each month. But recurring billing can also happen for variable amounts on any term or frequency on any date. Recurring billing is great for bills that never change amounts, for example: A monthly subscription to your favourite magazine.

Now that we know what recurring billing is, let’s see how recurring billing can make your business better:

Enable positive cash-flow

If like many other small business owners and freelancers you think that recurring billing is only for enterprise or corporate entities, you will be surprised to hear that recurring billing can work wonders for your SMME too. You can quite simply and very cost effectively implement recurring billing in your own small business.

Recurring billing for your SMMe means a healthy, increased cash-flow. Billing on a recurring term is also much less hassle compared to manual collection. Manual collection usually means putting you client in control of payment eg. Wire transfers or bank deposits. This can often lead to late payment and sporadic small payments that incur transaction fees for both you and the client.

If you are always unsure of when you will get your payment from your customer you can never plan ahead. This is where recurring billing saves the day. Now you know when you will be paid and can even work out a projected payment amount based on past success rates. This healthy cash-flow and ability to plan ahead ready does mean that your business can grow more rapidly.

Don’t forget to remember

Clients who forget to pay their invoices on time can seriously affect your business. Waiting for late payment is very negative. Recurring billing eliminates the need to wait for late payment and because it happens automatically means the client does not need to remember to physically pay you each month. It’s a great way to collect hassle-free on time payments.

Slash administration costs

Payment gateways that facilitate recurring payments usually offer automatic account recon or provide a bulk reconciliation files that allows easy and accurate resolution of customer payments. This in turn translates to massive savings in time and money on your side. No need to employ many staff members to collect payment an control recon, save money. Your customers will also thank you for this because they save time. They don’t have to worry about going through to the bank to make manual payment, recurring billing automatically takes care of their payment when it’s due.

Wow, that sounds great! But how do I get started? Signing up for a payment gateway and payment facilitating system is first. Find a gateway with competitive fees and a facilitator that enables automatic account recon.

Layout and design

You don’t need to be a designer to make a correctly laid out invoice with correctly formatted logo, colours and layout to match. Search the internet for examples of how professionally formatted invoices look or invest in software or a system to automatically generate these invoices for you. A lot of web-based services will allow you to create invoices free of charge while some charge a nominal monthly or once-off fee.

Important fields

Whether you are creating tax or non-tax invoices it is vital to have all required fields present on the quote or invoice. If you are issuing tax invoices check your local tax regulations to make sure that all legally required fields appear.

Spelling

Don’t you just hate it when you get an invoice where the issuer has spelt your name or address incorrectly? Worse still is if there are spelling mistakes in product or service descriptions that appear on it. Incorrect spelling on invoices can go a long way to harm the image of your business. Almost all systems, applications, programs and software have a spell check function – use it.

Follow the three easy steps above and you will be well on your way to sorting out your online invoicing!

Most online invoicing systems offer a limited free account or a 15 to 30 day trial. I would encourage any business owner to test drive any online invoicing system first before making a final decision on subscription and usage. It is important to remember however that the FREE accounts offered by most online invoicing systems do come with limited functionality. Often times limiting the amount of clients and users you can add as well as invoices you can issue. Some of the more advanced systems  also don’t include their best features in their FREE packages often times leaving out advance recurring billing , past due warning or support ticketing systems that may be avaialble on more advance packages. It is therefore also important to go through the systems documentation. features tour to see what you are missing out on.

Some of the more basic systems, or systems that are still in a beta state do offer completely FREE registration and usage. I’ll identify a few of these in a later blog post. Getting something for free is obviously a great thing, I love it! But sometimes you have to pay for a quality system. It’s best to determine what your needs are before diving head first into a completely free online invoicing system. You may just come up for air on the other side and find your self and your business limited by the constraints of the system if you haven’t done adequate research on the features it offers.

With that in mind have a look at the free account, demo’s and free trials that the online invoicing systems on my list have to offer:

This blog will act as a gateway to all the online invoicing resources I discover. The ultimate aim of this blog is to supply business owners and freelances with a one stop resource for online invoicing. I have already posted my complete list of online invoicing systems here. This should act as a great starting point for anyone looking for an online invoicing system. In future I hope to get price and feature comparisons up as well as reviews, system recommendations and insider news and information.  But before we begin with all that, here is a quick breakdown of what an online invoicing system actually is.

What is an online invoicing system?

An online invoicing system is a web based, ready hosted application that allows you to at the very minimum generate invoices and issue them via email.  You will be happy to hear that most online invoicing systems offer far more than just the basic invoicing features. Most offer the ability to manage clients, automate the sending of invoices and the reconciliation of payments.

Leading online invoicing systems offer advanced recurring and subscription billing, automated debit batch and credit card processing, automated payment reconciliation and advanced client management and secure data storage. There isn’t much that a leading online invoicing system can’t do, maybe not make the coffee? Although I wouldn’t put it past some of the cutting edge ones to offer integrated automated caffeine delivery systems.

A true online invoice systems requires no purchase, download or installation of software or updates. All data is securely stored and can be accessed online, anywhere, from any web enabled device. Most online invoicing systems therefore offer free accounts that allow you to test drive the online system. It’s always a good idea to make use of these free or demo accounts before choosing the right system for you.

I will compile an article shortly with links in to free trial accounts or demo accounts for all the major online invoicing systems. Feel free to check it out here when its posted.