Is your business searching for a more professional, simpler way to invoice because you are tired of manually making invoices in Microsoft Excel or Word? Maybe now is the time to investigate an online service that is going to help you issue quotations and invoices the better way.

Most small company owners and freelancers are use to manually creating invoices, but most of us are all too aware of the downside of manual invoicing:

– Time intensive: If you need to create and send invoices by hand you need to set aside at least 15 hours a week to do this. Your business also require more staff members to handle the workload.

– Capturing the same details repeatedly: Creating quotes and invoices yourself in Excel or Word usually means that the line items or item descriptions you use are not easily accessible and have to be re-entered or copy/pasted on a repetitive basis, wasting precious man hours.

– Duplication: Having to rewrite or copy/paste line item text and product descriptions each time you fill out a quote or invoice is also an un-necessary duplication resulting in lost time. Leaving your invoices subject to spelling mistakes and wrong or mismatched product descriptions.

– Sending quotes and invoices: Emailing invoices to clients manually opens a Pandora’s box of possible problems. Errors making invoices to a small enough send-able format like PDF can be difficult. This also introduces the possibility of emails being bounced because of attachment file size or the client not being able to view the invoice correctly.

– Storing your work: Hands on invoicing through Excel or Word usually means that you store all your invoices in one place on one PC. This can be problematic as you can only see your invoices from that one PC, so you cannot deal with invoicing queries when outside of the office. This gives a big blow to productivity.

– Data security and backups: Storing all your invoices and quotations on one computer also means that data is only as safe as the software you have in place to protect it. This often times leaves sensitive billing information open to the prying eyes of unauthorized users. Most small business owners do haphazardly backup this data on external hard-drives, but this type of backup needs to be done very frequently, else you risk losing all your data if your PC crashes or gets stolen.

This kind of thing may lead you to ask why anyone would still be using these old fashioned procedures to invoice to their customers. You will therefore be shocked to hear that a large portion of freelancers and SMME owners still apply these outdated business billing principles to their billing today. Little do they know that easy, secure, backed-up modern billing is only a few clicks away. And that this way of invoicing won’t cost you an arm and a leg.

The path forward: Web-based billing

Discovering an online billing system for your small business is one of the simplest things you can do. It also has one of the greatest impacts on your companies success. Simply start by doing an online search for an online billing or invoicing software solution, review and compare and you could be well on your way to simpler billing within a matter of minutes.

Pro’s of online billing:

– Web-based billing means saved time and money in your bank account. By utilizing an online billing software as opposed to using Excel or Word you can save at least of ten hours a week on your normal business billing.

– Human errors are mostly eliminated. As online invoicing software have built in fail-safe’s that stop duplication of data or accidental deletion of sensitive information.

– Automate do not duplicate. You won’t need to perform the same action more than once. Invoicing solutions use default templates and line items that you enter once and re-use as desired.

– Online billing removes the need for your businesses employees to manually send invoices to clients via email. A quality service will allow you to setup invoice times and then do all the work for you. Issuing the invoice, converting it to PDF and then mailing an html invoice with PDF attachment to your client.

– Are you on the go? Always out of the office seeing customers or meeting suppliers? A web-based invoicing system stores all your billing data online. This means you can access it anytime, anywhere, from any web enabled device. Truly mobile invoicing.

– Most online billing systems store your data securely on your behalf so you get the benefit of big company security without having to support the cost of the infrastructure yourself. Most good online invoicing systems also backup your data on your behalf. Some as often as every 15 minutes. So even if your laptop gets forgotten on the plane or your office computer has a meltdown you will NEVER lose any invoicing information.

Let’s get your business into the 21st century and stop you having to do all your quotations and invoices by hand. We suggest you get on the web and start looking for an online invoicing system straight away.

Before you settle on an online billing system, make sure you check Susan Bapsnill‘ recommended invoicing software and recurring billing system software solutions.