Lisa Schwarz | Senior Director of Global Product Marketing
July 2, 2021
Your company may do excellent work, have dedicated team members and serve a great group of customers, but if its invoicing function isn’t performing properly, you won’t be in business for long.
Invoicing is foundational for any company. The process also requires accuracy and timeliness. Get it wrong, and you won’t get paid or you’ll get paid late for your products or services, which really impacts your cash flow. And when you don’t get paid, you can’t compensate your employees or cover your overhead.
Errors in the invoicing process can also stir up customer suspicions about your business practices. Repeated errors will raise these potential red flags even higher and force your customers to rethink whether they want to do business with you (or not).
The good news is that there are steps you can take to reduce invoice errors and instill a high rate of confidence within your customer base.
If you want your invoices to be paid on time and without the need for additional human intervention, they have to be accurate. When the data that customers require to be able to process invoices is missing, there’s a good chance your payment will fall to the back of the line until someone figures out the problem. For example, instead of simply using “upon receipt” as a due date, be very specific about exactly when an invoice is due. That will help your customers manage their own payment schedules without having to guess at when an invoice is actually due. Note any discounts or incentives for paying early as well as late penalties and types of payments accepted. Having consistent, updated data across your systems is crucial, which is why it helps to have an enterprise resource planning system (ERP) to tie it all together. Your automated system should flag these types of issues for you, or you can review them by hand to ensure all fields are filled in with logical, relevant information. Either way, have a process in place to thoroughly review invoice data before hitting “send.”
If you’re making any or all of the invoicing mistakes outlined in this article, think about how these seemingly minor errors are impacting your cash flow and bottom line. Perhaps more importantly, consider how they are negatively impacting your customer relationships. By taking the advice outlined here, you can sidestep many of these issues, improve your customer relationships and run a more profitable organisation.
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