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Sunday 26 December 2010

Why should a business care about introducing e-billing?

Electronic billing (or E-billing for short) has been in the news a lot in recent years and has been widely introduced in bigger businesses like large utilities, telcos and even council organisations. But many small to medium sized enterprises (and quite a few larger ones) are still not convinced about the overall benefits and take the attitude that their existing approach is fine as it is-taking the view that “if it isn’t broken, then why mess with it?” While this may have been a reasonably tenable position two or three years ago, with faster connection speeds, increased use of the Internet by the general population and more and more ways to get on line now, the reasons to care about e-billing have become a lot more compelling. Let’s therefore look at the main reasons why every organisation (no matter what their size or business activity) should now take this very seriously:

1. First and foremost the use of full e-billing (and not just going to the half-way step of sending out an invoice by email attachment) can save a huge amount of money for an organisation (and for its consumers too). Research suggests that an average cost of sending each bill (and getting it paid) is as much as £15.00. E-billing can reduce this by as much as 65%, or to as little as £5.00 per bill-that can be a lot of money saved if you are sending out hundreds or thousands of bills each year.

2. It is much more convenient, fast, and easy to bill or invoice people on-line. There’s far less preparation time for a bill or statement to be sent or to arrive in the physical mail and any bill recipient can view his or her bill from the comfort of their home (or indeed from any location worldwide).

3. Even more beneficial is that an e-bill is accessible by customers 24/7 (and 365 days of the year) and thereby allows bill recipients to log on any time of the day or night to view the account and pay online.

4. With an e-bill (or what is perhaps better described as a full “digital” bill) there is often a multitude of immediate ways to pay or settle the bill while on-line. This means that with just a few clicks a bill can be paid by credit, debit, cash or other options, with no need for the recipient to have to write out cheques, post off a payment or have to go to an approved outlet (like a post office) to make a payment in person.

5. Research consistently suggests that customers pay e-bills 20-25% quicker than those sent by physical mail (thus helping to improve overall cash-flow).

6. An e-bill is very flexible in terms of storage and retrieval (saving data for longer and much more cost effectively). Sending organisations and recipients can save all bills/invoices on a good system (such as at www.payswyft.com). This means that all sorts of subsequent analysis can then be carried out. For the consumer this may be patterns of consumption or spending on different bills, and for an organisation it may be patterns of payment methods or relative time taken to open and pay a bill, for example.

7. Because e-bills are stored on-line as digital records, the data can easily be uploaded and downloaded as desired. This makes for easy transfer to and from spreadsheets and accounting systems. Perhaps more critically, this makes reconciliation considerably easier (cutting the need for expensive manual processes by a much as 80% and driving a large part of the savings in point 1).

8. Last but not least, E-billing allows the electronic bill recipient to reduce paper usage, which is naturally much friendlier to the environment.

Every one of the above ultimately can potentially create a much more user-friendly process to send a bill and get it paid for both the organisation and its customers. For this reason, e-billing should now be a key strategy for every business.

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