Manual invoicing is outdated. You are unlikely to disagree with that statement. Whether you are a small, medium or large enterprise, managing your accounts on paper or excel sheets is no longer viable. And to assist businesses to speedily and efficiently perform all accounting duties, software developers have come up with some really cool business tools. You can search for them under the banner “billing software for business”. Some of you may have already adopted these tools and understand the value such software brings to your business. For those of you who are still contemplating, this article will enlighten you about the capabilities of the humble yet super-powerful billing software.
Functions Performed by Billing Software
- Invoicing: Well, it is a billing software after all! Invoicing is its primary function. The invoicing function includes a range of features, which allows you to control, brand, categorize, reimburse, and store your bills all in one place. For instance, you can customize your invoices with your brand name and logo, draft the invoices and keep them in one place, manage your clients billing cycles, get paid immediately directly using secure payment gateways. So, full control of the entire invoicing cycle.
- Projects: Billing software now also includes project planning and management capabilities, making it super convenient. So you can assign work, manage project teams, draw new contracts and take approvals in a predesigned agreement style. Manage tasks, time, projects and conversions all from the expense function of the billing software.
- Time Tracking: Time is money! That is why you need to bill every moment spent on a project. The time tracking function also lets you manage how and where employees are spending time on. It is quite simple, just add new tasks under days and assign them to team members. Because you will be recording the time spent on a project, the bills generated will be devoid of errors. So, no more unbilled hours. It also records and tracks travel miles and convert them into invoices in a matter of minutes.
- Expenses: Just like invoicing, every business needs to be on top of their expenses. Your billing software with its expense management function will make sure that any money being spent or overspent is being tracked and recorded. This allows you to control any overheads and ensure that expenses undertaken are for beneficial reasons. The predesigned template makes it easy for employees to record all kinds of expenses. You can also classify expenses as recurring and record tax amounts separately. Upload and attach proof of expense in the form of receipts to the related projects.
- Estimates: Billing software makes it easy for you to attract new clients and business partners with powerful, professional-looking estimates. The interface makes it easy to generate new quotes or estimates, effortlessly. These estimates will be impactful, systematic, neat and detailed. The software has the feature of adding brand name and logo to each estimate and impress your future partners. Finally, the estimate history gives you an insight into older estimates and keeps track of their status.
- Payment: As touched upon before, billing software is connected with secure payment gateways such as PayPal. These platforms enable you to accept payments in all currencies. So if you are working with international clients, then you will not face delays in payment as you can immediately generate bills and share it for payment. Payment not received, just click on the Reminder feature and the software will automatically resend the bill back to the client.
- Reporting: Whether you want accounting, client, invoice or time tracking reports, the billing software will generate them. These reports will be highly detailed and accurate, which give a quick view into your business performance. For every data point, you can generate the report. For instance, if you want to generate a profit and loss report, then you can get it. The instant numbers give you a deeper insight into your business performance that will guide you towards better and more successful decisions.
- Review: Last, but not least is the function of review. If you are an e-commerce business or any business for that matter, reviews or feedback is a way of improving services. Billing software will also have the option of seeking reviews from clients and customers. Again, this is quite easy, you can send emails to your consumers and clients asking them to review your services.
Final Thoughts
See, it is fully loaded! Just because it is referred to as billing software does not restrict its functions to invoicing itself. Today, the holistic software lets you take charge of your business accounting cycle in all respects from expense management to report generation. Now that you have gone through this list, how many of these functions does your software provide? And if does not offer all of these, maybe it is time to switch to a more capable billing software for business!