Invoicing Basics: Everything You Need to Know

If you ever made a purchase either professionally or personally, you must have received a receipt labeled invoice. In the business landscape, it is an essential document for both buyers and sellers to keep track of their purchases or sales respectively. Due to its growing significance in business operations, businesses are turning towards invoice tracking software for efficient management. In this blog, we will understand what exactly an invoice means, and the role of invoice management software for corporates.

What is an invoice?

In short, an invoice is a purchase document that a seller shares with its buyer to collect payment. Generally, it comprises the cost of a product or service, the due amount, preferred payment method, and other details itemized to be presented as a commercial document.

Invoices help businesses with comprehensive record-keeping of all sales transactions. It is a key data point for companies to understand how and when they will receive payments so that they can manage their cash flow. Some of the benefits of invoices are:

• Diligent analysis of invoices helps businesses predict future sales
• Businesses get a broad overview of their financial outlook
• Invoices play a crucial role in efficient inventory management
• Invoice management helps companies with easy tax filings

The criticality of invoices makes its management tiresome. You will have to review, validate, and reconcile hundreds of invoices you get every month. It can take companies months before they can approve and process the payments. Due to the delay caused, companies end up paying penalties for late invoice clearances. In addition, it will create a poor reputation for your brand. For sellers, if the invoice creation is delayed, it will upset their cash flow due to late payments. However, you can automate the entire process and eliminate the delays through invoice tracking software.

What is invoice tracking software?

Invoice tracking software is an automation platform that streamlines the entire invoice management process- right from creating invoices, and sharing them to receiving payments on time. It also frees up the time your finance team spends on invoicing for other important business operations. Automating invoice tracking and management will help businesses reduce mistakes and delays.

Benefits of invoice management software

Invoice tracking software introduces efficiency across your financial and customer management operations by making invoice management effortless and enhancing your customer experience. Some of its benefits are:

Send accurate invoices quickly

With invoice tracking software, you can consolidate all the relevant data from multiple sources to spin up an invoice in a matter of minutes. You can eliminate human errors by automating the entire process. In addition, it will also save you a lot of manual work hours.

Send reminders for timely payments

Even though companies want to clear the invoices on time, they often end up missing the due date. You can avoid that by sending them timely reminders and notifications for the outstanding invoices. Invoice tracking software lets you create custom alert messages and schedule them as frequently as you want.

Never forget to send invoices

Financial teams are often buried under a mountain of work, and in that, you might neglect an invoice that should’ve been sent. It will not only upset your cash flow but also create a lot of confusion. The invoice tracking system helps you avoid this by automating the entire journey right when an order request is created. This means your customers will receive an automated invoice with little human intervention.

Eliminate runaround for payment methods

Different customers prefer different payment options. You can improve customer experience by giving them multiple payment methods right on the invoice. All you need to do is enable a payment link in the invoice itself with the invoice tracking software.

How to select the right invoice management software

Today, you have multiple options to pick an invoice management platform. However, you must pick the one that is the most ideal for your business requirements. Below we listed some of the factors that you should consider when selecting an invoice tracking software.

• The solution must allow configurations or customizations to suit your invoice workflow.
• It must allow you to personalize the invoice by adding your logo, business details, and other information.
• It should allow multiple payment options to give enough options for your customers.
• The invoice tracking software must have the functionality to send alerts or notifications.
• Your platform must also be able to produce quotes, estimates, and similar forms.

Conclusion

Invoice tracking software must make your life easy when it comes to invoice management. If you want to maximize the benefits of the automated solution, you must collaborate with a solution like Zaggle Zoyer. It has a robust invoice management feature that allows you to incorporate digitalized invoice processing through a powerful portal. It offers features like:

• Simplified self-onboarding and KYC process
• Create and share invoices from the platform on the go
• Comprehensive visibility into invoice status
• Communication channels for instant connection

Check it out here.