When it comes to formatting and presenting your invoices, you won’t be stuck for inspiration! If you Google “free invoice template” you’ll be given around 40 million results...the only challenge is cutting through the clutter to find a template that works for you.
But it’s not a decision to be taken lightly. Whether you’re a one person business or a huge multi-national, raising an invoice is the start of a long process that ends when payment reaches your account. Somewhere along the line, your customer could get distracted or decide to prioritise other bills – so it’s vital to find a template with clear itemisation and prominent instructions for payment.
So what are your best choices?
Perhaps the obvious route is to choose a template from a desktop application like Word or Excel. Both provide attractive and well-designed invoices, with space for personalisation - so you can add customer details, product and service descriptions, and even your company logo.
If you’re happy to wander a little off the beaten track (and maybe spend some money), there are software packages out there that will generate invoices for you. Most work in much the same way as the desktop templates, but some will also generate sequential numbers. This will help you to store and retrieve old invoices, and avoid the classic mistake of overtyping the last invoice raised.
Both of these options will ‘do the job’, but both have their limitations, because they only offer you two choices – print and post, or send by email.
If you take the print option, there’s a cost to you (not to mention the environment). And if you opt for an email attachment, your important invoice will sit in someone’s inbox alongside thousands of less vital messages.
In the digital age, we can do better
Today, the best alternative is to use a bill presentment service, which renders your invoice as a full digital bill. Your customer can view their bill online - still in its familiar offline format – and click through for more details, storage options, delegation...and to make payment!
One example of electronic bill presentment is PaySwyft.com, where sole traders, partnerships and other companies can create simple, professional invoices that encourage customers to act swiftly. Using the site’s free invoice template, you can personalise your bills just as you would with a desktop or software template.
The difference is, you can present them online and make it easier than ever for your customers to pay.
Monday 25 April 2011
Sunday 17 April 2011
Ten ways to accelerate cash flow
In today’s tough economic climate all businesses need to pay even more close attention to ensure that cash due from customers flows in as quickly and smoothly as possible. What follows is ten key ways that cash-flow can be accelerated:
1. Send invoice as soon as possible after a product is supplied or a service is rendered, because every day you are late is at least one more day your customer will wait to pay-terms only start once they receive your bill. If it takes a week to get the bills out, on average, that’s a week’s worth of cash-flow. Also, follow up on major invoices to ensure the client has received the invoice. Invoices can often be delayed by an internal authorisation process, or just going astray.
2. Clear and professional looking invoices get taken more seriously. Make sure that they therefore contain all the information such as the correct entity name, right address etc with clear ways to pay listed.
3. Set fair and appropriate credit terms and communicate these clearly with a ‘due date’ very visible on the invoice. You may even want to set the payment expectations of new customers with a specific welcome letter.
4. Deposit all payments made immediately (especially when these are cheques or cash). The more these can get into a bank account quickly the better.
5. Offer several payment methods not just one or two -customers should never have an excuse for late payment related to your lack of convenient payment options-all customers today (small and large) need to be given choices.
6. Offer early payment discounts so long as it doesn’t swallow up all the profit. If customers are struggling, the sooner you provide the facility to partially pay, the sooner the debt is paid. If a customer exceeds their terms, you can offer cash on delivery terms until the account is back on track.
7. In order to remind customers when to pay, you need a system to let you know when they are due. A series of email/SMS messages, depending upon the time overdue with relevant wording, is often very useful.
8. A great target or key performance indicator for accounts receivables is ‘accounts receivable days’. This is not to be confused with the terms you offer customers. The ‘accounts receivable days’ is the average number of days that all customers are taking to pay you. Of course you want this to be on terms or better.
9. Use you improved cash flow practices to reduce your overdraft or “float” thus saving interest costs or giving you extra cash to spend elsewhere.
10. Aim to do as much of the above as possible online at a flexible and versatile bill presentment and payment web site (such as payswyft.com). Not only will clearly presented electronic bills arrive much quicker but research suggests that customers pay 35% quicker when they receive an online bill and can pay it online on the same web site. Sites like PaySwyft also automatically bundle many of the above steps in the technology or give an organisation a range of options to help accelerate cash-flow.
Ultimately, if you can entrench these steps into your payment strategy and operational practices you will find accounts receivables less of a hassle, resulting in greatly improved cash-flow for your business.
1. Send invoice as soon as possible after a product is supplied or a service is rendered, because every day you are late is at least one more day your customer will wait to pay-terms only start once they receive your bill. If it takes a week to get the bills out, on average, that’s a week’s worth of cash-flow. Also, follow up on major invoices to ensure the client has received the invoice. Invoices can often be delayed by an internal authorisation process, or just going astray.
2. Clear and professional looking invoices get taken more seriously. Make sure that they therefore contain all the information such as the correct entity name, right address etc with clear ways to pay listed.
3. Set fair and appropriate credit terms and communicate these clearly with a ‘due date’ very visible on the invoice. You may even want to set the payment expectations of new customers with a specific welcome letter.
4. Deposit all payments made immediately (especially when these are cheques or cash). The more these can get into a bank account quickly the better.
5. Offer several payment methods not just one or two -customers should never have an excuse for late payment related to your lack of convenient payment options-all customers today (small and large) need to be given choices.
6. Offer early payment discounts so long as it doesn’t swallow up all the profit. If customers are struggling, the sooner you provide the facility to partially pay, the sooner the debt is paid. If a customer exceeds their terms, you can offer cash on delivery terms until the account is back on track.
7. In order to remind customers when to pay, you need a system to let you know when they are due. A series of email/SMS messages, depending upon the time overdue with relevant wording, is often very useful.
8. A great target or key performance indicator for accounts receivables is ‘accounts receivable days’. This is not to be confused with the terms you offer customers. The ‘accounts receivable days’ is the average number of days that all customers are taking to pay you. Of course you want this to be on terms or better.
9. Use you improved cash flow practices to reduce your overdraft or “float” thus saving interest costs or giving you extra cash to spend elsewhere.
10. Aim to do as much of the above as possible online at a flexible and versatile bill presentment and payment web site (such as payswyft.com). Not only will clearly presented electronic bills arrive much quicker but research suggests that customers pay 35% quicker when they receive an online bill and can pay it online on the same web site. Sites like PaySwyft also automatically bundle many of the above steps in the technology or give an organisation a range of options to help accelerate cash-flow.
Ultimately, if you can entrench these steps into your payment strategy and operational practices you will find accounts receivables less of a hassle, resulting in greatly improved cash-flow for your business.
Friday 8 April 2011
Developing a Payment Strategy-Step 5- Building a seamless payments process.
In exploring what is involved in developing an overall payments strategy, in this fifth and final article in the series we will look at building a seamless payments process.
There is no “one-size-fit-all” payment strategy for every organisation, as there will be many individual factors to be taken into account in every case, and this is likely to affect the choices made. However, one aspect about a payments process appears to have almost universal appeal when it comes to customers-they want a “seamless” experience as much as possible. “Seamless” means without joins or to be continuous or even “flowing” from one stage in the process to the next. For a payments process this entails that every step needs to flow in this smooth way to ensure that the customer experience is a straightforward and relatively painless one (given that few people probably like actually paying bills).
Research again and again confirms that flexibility and choice should be a major driver in making the customer experience a positive one, when it comes to rendering payment and the web can now deliver much of this with a little careful pre-planning. In practice, this suggests that the entire payment strategy can be centred around an Internet web site (whether this is in-house or an third-party one). On this site, all the payments process steps of issuing the invoice, offering various payment channels, taking different kinds of payments, reconciling payments to invoices, banking the payments and accounting for the whole payment transaction are possible-a one-stop shop. Of course, some customers either will not or cannot transact on the web and the organisation may therefore have to continue to physically send, email or SMS invoices and even accept telephone based or postal payments. The key issue here however is that this population of customers can be kept to a minimum and encouraged to transition over time. For example, those people making telephone payments can be shown how easy it is to do make the same recurrent payment online (especially when the convenience of doing so 24/7 and 365 days a year is appreciated and not just when call centre lines are open for instance).
In summary then, all organisations of all sizes and types should develop and continue to hone a payments strategy that offers more flexibility and choice to customers. In the chosen approach, being fast and efficient in making the bill available is critical, as is making the whole experience as user-friendly as possible. By doing this, an organisation will usually get the change pioneers and early adopters to experiment with the new approach, and it is their experience that will have a “viral” influence on those customers who do not like to be the first to try new things. Organisations therefore have to be patient and take a long-term view, but in doing so, can drive both bill presentment and payment acceptance costs down substantially.
There is no “one-size-fit-all” payment strategy for every organisation, as there will be many individual factors to be taken into account in every case, and this is likely to affect the choices made. However, one aspect about a payments process appears to have almost universal appeal when it comes to customers-they want a “seamless” experience as much as possible. “Seamless” means without joins or to be continuous or even “flowing” from one stage in the process to the next. For a payments process this entails that every step needs to flow in this smooth way to ensure that the customer experience is a straightforward and relatively painless one (given that few people probably like actually paying bills).
Research again and again confirms that flexibility and choice should be a major driver in making the customer experience a positive one, when it comes to rendering payment and the web can now deliver much of this with a little careful pre-planning. In practice, this suggests that the entire payment strategy can be centred around an Internet web site (whether this is in-house or an third-party one). On this site, all the payments process steps of issuing the invoice, offering various payment channels, taking different kinds of payments, reconciling payments to invoices, banking the payments and accounting for the whole payment transaction are possible-a one-stop shop. Of course, some customers either will not or cannot transact on the web and the organisation may therefore have to continue to physically send, email or SMS invoices and even accept telephone based or postal payments. The key issue here however is that this population of customers can be kept to a minimum and encouraged to transition over time. For example, those people making telephone payments can be shown how easy it is to do make the same recurrent payment online (especially when the convenience of doing so 24/7 and 365 days a year is appreciated and not just when call centre lines are open for instance).
In summary then, all organisations of all sizes and types should develop and continue to hone a payments strategy that offers more flexibility and choice to customers. In the chosen approach, being fast and efficient in making the bill available is critical, as is making the whole experience as user-friendly as possible. By doing this, an organisation will usually get the change pioneers and early adopters to experiment with the new approach, and it is their experience that will have a “viral” influence on those customers who do not like to be the first to try new things. Organisations therefore have to be patient and take a long-term view, but in doing so, can drive both bill presentment and payment acceptance costs down substantially.
Friday 1 April 2011
Developing a Payment Strategy-Step 4- Making as much payment choice available as possible.
In exploring what is involved in developing an overall payments strategy, in this article we will look at the fourth phase of five in total, which is making as much payment choice available to customers as possible.
Every organisation wants to get paid (and as quickly as possible) but there are clearly many ways in which this may be done by customers. This creates an interesting dilemma. On the one hand, by keeping payment choices to a minimum, complexity is reduced for the organisation but flexibility of options is decreased for the customer. On the other hand, a wide array of payment options creates high customer choice but with a high degree of handling complexity for the business. In the past, the size of the average transaction, the billing cycle frequency and the volume were the main determinants of strategy here (and may have favoured fewer payment choices such as cheque and direct debit only for instance as a way of keeping things simple and processing costs low) but with the more widespread use of the Internet for payments in recent years, the balance towards greater customer payment option choice has become much easier and therefore compelling.
Offering a wider choice of payments incorporates not only varying payment channels but also a variety of payment types. Different channels include the traditional ones of mailed-in cheques and direct bank transfer (direct debit or standing order) but these days can often also include operating a central call centre (in-house or outsourced), automated telephone services or payment via the web (at a company built or third-party site). Different types of payment include cheque, cash and bank transfer, but can be easily extended to a wide variety of credit and debit cards, pre-paid cards and e-wallet transfers.
Internet technology now allows considerable flexibility for an organisation of any size to offer most of the above channels with a web site at the hub of the offering. In addition, an e-payment gateway can now be relatively easily added to enable credit side and debit side, options, as well as e-wallet payments to be taken online. Perhaps even more attractive to an organisation is adding a reputable third-party electronic billing and payment aggregation destination site (such as PaySwyft) as an offering in the overall mix. At such a site, an organisation can present all of its bills in digital form and then allow these bills to be paid with almost every available payment type, including cash in many cases. Because the aggregator takes the payments, collects them together electronically and then settles to its merchants online also, this helps to drive down the internal expense of payment call handling and the acceptance and reconciliation costs of handling cheques (and any other paper-based transactions).
Whatever approach selected by an organisation, today’s customers prefer a variety of payment options to be available meet their different and often changing needs when it comes to paying invoices. The reward for making this available is quicker settlement and thereby accelerated cash-flow. A wise business therefore finds the most cost-effective ways to offer as much choice as they can.
In our next article in this series, we will look at the next phase in developing the Payment Strategy- Building a seamless payments process.
Every organisation wants to get paid (and as quickly as possible) but there are clearly many ways in which this may be done by customers. This creates an interesting dilemma. On the one hand, by keeping payment choices to a minimum, complexity is reduced for the organisation but flexibility of options is decreased for the customer. On the other hand, a wide array of payment options creates high customer choice but with a high degree of handling complexity for the business. In the past, the size of the average transaction, the billing cycle frequency and the volume were the main determinants of strategy here (and may have favoured fewer payment choices such as cheque and direct debit only for instance as a way of keeping things simple and processing costs low) but with the more widespread use of the Internet for payments in recent years, the balance towards greater customer payment option choice has become much easier and therefore compelling.
Offering a wider choice of payments incorporates not only varying payment channels but also a variety of payment types. Different channels include the traditional ones of mailed-in cheques and direct bank transfer (direct debit or standing order) but these days can often also include operating a central call centre (in-house or outsourced), automated telephone services or payment via the web (at a company built or third-party site). Different types of payment include cheque, cash and bank transfer, but can be easily extended to a wide variety of credit and debit cards, pre-paid cards and e-wallet transfers.
Internet technology now allows considerable flexibility for an organisation of any size to offer most of the above channels with a web site at the hub of the offering. In addition, an e-payment gateway can now be relatively easily added to enable credit side and debit side, options, as well as e-wallet payments to be taken online. Perhaps even more attractive to an organisation is adding a reputable third-party electronic billing and payment aggregation destination site (such as PaySwyft) as an offering in the overall mix. At such a site, an organisation can present all of its bills in digital form and then allow these bills to be paid with almost every available payment type, including cash in many cases. Because the aggregator takes the payments, collects them together electronically and then settles to its merchants online also, this helps to drive down the internal expense of payment call handling and the acceptance and reconciliation costs of handling cheques (and any other paper-based transactions).
Whatever approach selected by an organisation, today’s customers prefer a variety of payment options to be available meet their different and often changing needs when it comes to paying invoices. The reward for making this available is quicker settlement and thereby accelerated cash-flow. A wise business therefore finds the most cost-effective ways to offer as much choice as they can.
In our next article in this series, we will look at the next phase in developing the Payment Strategy- Building a seamless payments process.
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