A good billing process keeps revenue flowing into your business to provide working capital. Today, we deepen our focus on billing best practices with tips to automate your billing process.
Here are five ways to streamline billing and improve cash flow:
1. Group time entries across tickets onto a single invoice.
Most customers prefer to pay vendors once per month and receive a single, itemized invoice. In order to incorporate all services for the month onto just one (or perhaps two) invoices, you’ll need an efficient process for capturing ALL time and expenses.
Tip: With ConnectWise PSA™ (formerly Manage), tickets flow automatically to billing, so it’s easy to get all time and expenses for the month onto a single invoice.
2. When applicable, bundle agreement invoices onto a single invoice.
In order to avoid confusing your customers, do not send multiple invoices to the same customer for multiple agreements.
Tip: Using parent/child features in ConnectWise PSA will allow multiple agreements to be bundled on a single customer invoice.
3. Always protect your customers’ credit card information.
Any data breach of financial information will quickly erode customer confidence. Store credit card information in a secure, password-protected location outside of your operations software.
Tip: Do not store credit card numbers in ConnectWise PSA—only in PCI-DSS compliant systems.
4. Manage time entries by exception instead of searching all time entries for errors.
Improve efficiency by searching for details you know are errors instead of picking through each time entry. This will speed up invoice approval, resulting in more timely delivery of invoices.
Tip: Manage time entries by exception from the time search screen in ConnectWise PSA by creating views that display potential errors.
5. Avoid invoice shock for work taking place outside an agreement.
If you’ve taken on a big project that falls outside the scope (and fees) of your recurring revenue agreement, get authorization from your customer before starting. And call the customer to give a heads up before sending the invoice—especially if it’s for a large amount.
Tip: For work outside of an agreement that will be invoiced, create a procedure and record customer authorization into the ticket in ConnectWise PSA.
[Bonus] To keep track of high-dollar activities, create service tickets for the accounting department.
Your accounting team needs to know when something out of the ordinary will be billed or invoiced. A surprise could lead to a shortage of cash or an invoice delay.
Bonus Tip: In ConnectWise PSA, create a ticket and use it to track comments and statuses of high-dollar activity, so there is full visibility in accounting.
This concludes our two-part series on realizing optimal cash flow. Have you found a few ideas to incorporate in your billing process?
If you believe billing might be holding your business back, give us a call or check out the ConnectWise PSA demo. See what automation combined with 30+ years of best practices can do for your business.
