5 Reasons to outsource your e-invoicing!

Some of my earlier blogs have preached the importance of optimising both a paperless process and an e-invoicing process!

I support this opinion and I do believe that both systems or processes can co-exist.

Now that’s out of the way let’s get to the point of this article!

E-billing provides a number of great features such as the option to retrieve documents in PDF; Excel; EDI; XML; or CSV formats you can view and interact with your online statement, query invoices and download copy invoices if required.

5 reasons why e-invoicing should be implemented alongside your current print and mailing process:

1. Get payments faster

Emailing of your bills and payment can reduce your DSO (Days Sales Outstanding) cycle by as much as 70% by reducing the time taken to send out invoices to your customers. I am constantly bemused by many companies emphasising the importance of sales,sales,sales yet they forget to manage their current debtors often accepting payment terms way in excess of 60 days, in some cases 90; firstly ,why are you supplying a company that takes that long to pay you after you’ve supplied the goods or service?

But here’s the real push, why are you telling your sales force to be proactive in generating sales if you are not managing your payment terms with your customers? That’s me having a moan because the solutions provided by Digital Print Management are designed to speed up the process and distribution of statements and invoices. So if we reduce the turnaround from say 4 days to 1 day for posting/emailing out; and your lax in enforcing your payment terms then frankly you’re not really benefiting!

2. Current financial climate

The tough climate demands faster payment and reducing the time taken for a customer to pay can only have a positive effect on your bottomline it also aids the company to grow and to be competitive. It has to be imperative that you have a robust credit management system in place, a dedicated team of credit controllers whose only point of existence is to get the cash in for the business thus supporting the effort of e-invoicing!

3. The easier you make the process the easier it is for your customer to pay

- DPM’s system allows invoices to be delivered as secure electronic documents directly into the customers inboxes without any link to a site to register and fetch their invoices. There is the option to pay now by including a payment option using a form within the invoice or a link to a company’s payment website; this in turn facilitates quicker payment because if the customer has opened the email, viewed the invoice, the psychology is simply “I’m there now so I may as well pay it!”

4. Transpromo marketing

Using our eBilling solution why not take up the option to cross sell or up sell messages with each bill? Marketing messages can be added to each bill both within the email and on the e-invoice attachment. By taking advantage of the process you are driving qualified traffic to your website to potentially re-order or view more of your goods and services.

5. Keeping up with technology

- there is an assumption that moving to e-invoicing will be costly and difficult to implement internally which is a valid argument. But by outsourcing the process, there is no need for big spending on software as the e-billing provider takes care of that keeping the cost of implementation to a minimum improving efficiency, reducing costs from the generation of the e-invoice to the pay process.

After all is said and done the take up on e-invoicing is slow in the UK particularly when compared to the rest of Europe; according to Deutsche Bank research only 10% of companies in the UK undertook a strategic move to e-invoicing in 2010!

What do you think, is paper dead or is the UK still along way from e-invoicing?

Email us to discuss