Business owners and accountants have benefited a lot from Word and Excel accounting options. One of the most user-friendly features of these two programs was invoicing. Simple, yet easily organized and effective invoices have been used by numerous entrepreneurs for more than two decades.
However, if you’re about to launch a business career nowadays, you can opt for some more reliable and advanced invoicing solutions. While Word and Excel will meet your basic needs, they can cause some inconveniences that can be avoided by using other solutions. Here’s what advantages you’ll find in specialized invoicing tools.
Reducing the risk of lost invoices
You know the drill – you choose an invoice form, enter the data pertaining to the client and save the document in one of the numerous folders on your hard disk.
However, when the tasks are running and concentration is waning, due to exhausting workload, it might happen that you save the invoice in the wrong folder.
As a result, you won’t be able to find it when you need it. For instance, you might need to remind a late payer about their debt or collect the invoices for your tax return. If you can’t track that document in your folders, you won’t have the legal ground to send a reminder to that client. What’s more, you won’t be able to justify that expense on the tax form.
Furthermore, saving business invoices on your hard disk is a risky decision. Namely, in case of a hardware failure, you might lose track of any invoice you’ve ever issued or received.
An alternative to these undesired outcomes is using invoicing software such as Invoicebus. By doing so you’ll be able to perform all the actions for every single invoice within the same tool from any device at any time. Also, you’ll have a chance to choose from a variety of invoice templates and tracking options, as well as keep your invoices safe and backed up in the cloud. That way, you’ll almost completely eradicate the risk of losing invoices.
Preventing cash flow problems
One of the key goals of every business owners is to avoid problems with cash flow. If you work with Excel or Word invoices, the entire procedure will last much longer than it should in this day and age.
For instance, you send out a Word invoice via email and the other party receives the document. What they do next is analyze the invoice and send back the check that will cover the amount of money specified by the invoice.
While this is also a legitimate way to make business payments, it has one major flaw – it’s time-consuming. You might spend weeks checking your email inbox folder, waiting for your check. Even though all this might be finished within the pre-agreed payment period, it could be frustrating and have a negative effect on your cash flow.
So, opting for one of cutting-edge invoicing solutions will raise the payment procedure you use on a completely new level. In turn, all the parties included in the invoicing and payment process will reduce the time they spend waiting for their payments,
Wasting no time on manual work
If you decide to perform invoicing via Word, Excel or any other similar program, you’ll basically waste your time doing two separate tasks.
On the one hand, there’s creating, editing, sending and receiving invoices. On the other, you need to revise your spreadsheets and update them with the newest calculations after making payments or sending invoices. Moving along these two separate lines at the same time will sooner or later result in mismatches.
What’s more, you’ll also avoid wasting your precious time on double entry of products and services, like when you’re entering them into the spreadsheets and then again when you’re filling out the invoices. Also, it might happen that you enter an invoice twice in Excel, which will lead to duplicating your invoices. As a result, you can have wrongly calculated payments and incorrectly populated invoices.
Luckily, today you can choose, populate and send an invoice with a few touches on your smartphone. Namely, many invoicing tools offer apps for smart gadgets. Let’s say you have a side job and need to perform some invoicing actions daily. Instead of waiting to come back home from work and sit at your desk, you can deal with invoicing while commuting from work.
By reducing the amount of manual work required by Word and Excel invoices, you’ll save a lot of time. In turn, you can commit yourself to some leisure activities, to maintain a productive mindset and get back to work rejuvenated and eager to work on new projects.
Enhancing accounting operations
While Excel definitely excels at performing your business calculations, it comes with one major flaw – invoicing and accounting are two separate areas of this tool. Consequently, when you’re done with your accounting work, you need to switch to invoicing, which includes some manual work.
As we’ve explained in the previous paragraph, not only that it will waste your precious me-time, but it will also increase the risk of making mistakes while invoicing.
When you’re using a tool that can track your payments and expenses, as well as perform your invoicing tasks, you can focus on the core business decisions.
Apart from that, even if you make a mistake while entering some business information, you can simply correct that part and the tool will automatically fix all other miscalculations.
As opposed to that, discovering a mistake in traditional accounting and invoicing tools will lead to endless report analyses, until you’ve found the wrongly calculated part.
Avoiding errors in invoices
When you’re creating your invoices with Excel and Word, you can easily make errors regarding the information contained in those documents.
For instance, you’re about to send an invoice to a client and you simply open the one you sent last month. After changing the sum and the date, you send the invoice. The following day you open your email and there’s a message from that client, informing you that you entered the wrong sum. Of course, you’ll correct the sum and everything will be sorted out, but such little details might affect your reputation.
Contrary to that, using an invoicing tool will minimize your exposure to such inconveniences. Modern invoicing solutions can be adjusted to automatically update and change the dates and other numbers on your invoices. As a result, you’ll be able to perform all your business actions in a more relaxed way, knowing that your invoicing is in safe hands.
Conclusion
Invoicing can be done in many different ways. While you can still adhere to some traditional features, like Word and Excel, you can make your work easier by using some modern invoicing tools. The variety of options these solutions offer will improve your invoicing experience, as well as accelerate the entire work process. Finally, you’ll have more time for your basic work tasks, as well as more free time. All in all, those cutting-edge invoicing features will make both your professional and private life more convenient.
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