Subscribe
In this episode of the Sage Advice Podcast, “Business Management as a Key to Success ,” Joan Boluda gives us some basic tips on invoicing for small businesses.
Learn the billing concepts that all small businesses should know in order to keep their billing up to date without errors.
Familiarizing your entire staff with invoices is essential to the health of any business.
Many SMEs are not very denmark email list good at invoicing. For them, every invoice issued or received (not to mention the pending ones) is like a pain in the ass. It is an obligation that they do not understand and that they cover as best they can. In reality, all this frustration is the result of a mistaken conception.
Like everything in life, good billing must be based on solid foundations. This is the only way to turn what may seem like a tedious activity into one of the most useful tools of the business .
1. Knowledge is power
It is not surprising that the first and foremost basis of all is knowledge. Surely, when we have a bad relationship with invoices, the most common thing is that the entire staff runs away and leaves the responsibility in the expert hands of the advisor or the accounting or administrative department.
However, we are faced with a document that has implications that go beyond documenting a commercial transaction or complying with tax obligations.
It is therefore a good idea to disseminate knowledge about billing throughout the company, but adapted to the tasks of each employee. Billing must be understood as an intermediate point in a data process.
Many times, the problem for companies that have so much trouble invoicing is that they have not known how to focus on the usefulness of invoices . They only see it as an obligation. They forget that in this small document we record key data about the business's operations.
What kind of information do invoices provide?
As if it were a detective novel, invoices are the ones that hold most of the answers : who, when, where, how much (and for how much)… We still need to know the whys that led to each operation. And that involves relating billing data with other data from the different areas of the business.
For example, let's think about a warehouse. Invoices will tell us when we made a supply of products, what type they were, who we bought from, the day the order was placed and the day of payment, how much they cost, the number of physical units we ordered...
With all this kind of data, we can cover our billing obligations , but we want more. We need to know what happened to the order reflected in the invoice. Did it arrive on time? Where was it stored and under what circumstances? When did the products leave the warehouse? And, of course, we are also interested in going back and knowing why we ordered those products from that supplier and not another, why we decided to place the order at that exact time, what conditions we required…
The invoice is like a zero kilometer in our information processes . It is a starting and ending point, a reference that, in one way or another, is setting the pace of our business and provides coherence and traceability to the data.
2. The invoice as an experience
The next basic aspect to internalize is that we care not only about the invoice as a document, but also as an experience . Do you remember when you get in touch with that supplier who makes a lot of mistakes, never sends invoices on time, doesn't know how to rectify them, isn't able to check if they reflect the reality of the operation, can't view or print them in the format we ask for...? That's a bad experience.
Therefore, we must work on the billing experience in the same way as the consumer or payment experience. In fact, the billing experience and the payment experience are like Siamese twins. We must work together to ensure fluidity, convenience, security, etc.
3. Technology: the great ally of billing
We have a great ally to tackle this great challenge that is billing: technology. In recent years, we have seen great milestones, largely related to electronic billing . For example, we have discovered that invoices have their best home in the cloud, a collaborative, secure home that streamlines processes at any time and place . And the same goes for automation with billing software , which is doing its bit in accounting for invoices.
