How to Master Your Invoicing Process

Optimising cash flow is a key element of business success, allowing you to pay your staff and suppliers on time. One of the easiest ways to do this is to invoice your customers accurately and fast, which sounds simple but without a streamlined invoicing process, there’s a lot that can go wrong.

This guide walks you through how to create an invoice checklist to make sure that every product, material and every service you offer to your customers is invoiced with timely precision. This can include anything from parts and labour to delivery, time, mark-up and more. First, let’s take a look at what can go wrong, then we’ll show you how to avoid the pitfalls with your invoicing process.

Alternatively, you can visit our invoicing software page directly and find out how we can help you enhance the efficiency of your operations.

What can go wrong with a poor invoicing process?

Capturing data

If your business involves lots of small jobs, how do you know for certain that you are invoicing out and being paid for everything? When there are lots of components, vital information can easily go missing when using inaccurate invoicing procedures. 

One of the fundamental problems in businesses working with high volume, low value jobs, is for some jobs not to get invoiced at all. This is really common in organisations that don’t have a centralised service management system and established invoicing process. Think about it – if you work with paper job sheets, how easy is it for one of these to get lost? If it doesn’t find its way back to the person who does the invoicing or it doesn’t get manually uploaded into the invoicing system, the job and all of the costs associated with that just fall into a black hole – that’s lost revenue and that impacts your bottom line. 

Invoicing errors

Capturing data correctly is also an issue for many businesses. Handwritten job sheets are a sure way to create invoicing errors. Poor handwriting can mean data is misinterpreted, and mistakes can happen purely when punching the data in. These little mistakes all lead to hold ups in payment by your customers. By the time a query is resolved, and the invoice corrected, weeks could have gone by.

Invoicing delay

In a manual system, there’s quite often a considerable time lag between carrying out the job and raising the invoice. Take the old-fashioned scenario (which is actually still quite a common way of working), your engineer has a job sheet, they finish the job, but don’t drop it back to the office for days. Then the job has to be manually keyed into the accounting system and it often doesn’t get invoiced until several days after completion. 

Inefficient work processes

So, you think you’ve got the invoicing time lag issue sussed, but does this mean your engineers are driving back to the office at regular intervals to drop off their job sheets? If they are expected to come back to the office at the end of each day, that could be hampering productivity and heaping on indirect and unbillable costs in time and fuel. It’s just not an efficient use of an engineer’s time. It would make far more business sense for engineers to do an extra job, rather than waste time delivering job sheets.

The ultimate invoicing checklist

While there are some common pitfalls with invoicing that could be costing your business money, there are also some very simple solutions, from slick software to very small and easy tweaks to your procedures. Here’s how to keep invoice records in order to keep cashflow at its optimum:

1. Rule number 1 is to stay organised – it can be a pain keeping up with paperwork, but the minute you fall behind with invoicing, you are putting your cash flow at risk
2. Make sure quotes are signed off and tied to a job number before anyone starts work
3. Invoice regularly – send them out as soon as a job is done – don’t wait until the end of the month
4. Keep language simple and clear and consistent across estimates, job sheets and invoices to avoid any disputes – these details are important
5. Ensure invoices are paid on time by setting clear and prompt terms, as well as introducing a ‘late payment fee’ policy as a deterrent
6. Make it easy for customers to pay you – consider new payment methods. Can your customers pay you via Stripe or PayPal? Most payment platforms charge you a fee, but if it speeds up the payment process and helps your debtor position, it could be worth it. If you’re a domestic contractor, can your customers easily pay you electronically via debit or credit card?
7. Build good relationships with your customers – the kind of service you offer will be the biggest influence on the relationship you develop with your customers and happy customers are more likely to pay their bills on time – build rapport and iron out any disputes quickly
8. Consider investing in software, such as Joblogic, to streamline your job management and invoicing system

How Joblogic is a game changer for invoicing

Imagine if you had a software package that captured every aspect of the quoting and invoice management software process, and could even collect payments for you via a secure gateway? No punching data into spreadsheets, no handwritten job sheets, no dropping job sheets off to the office and no complicated monitoring of time or materials. Just a simple process to set up a quote, link it to a job and follow everything from start through to invoicing via a single, cloud-based platform. Joblogic’s field service invoicing software enables you to do all of this and more. Engineers simply key in data to an app on their phone or portable device. When a job is finished, it’s ready for invoicing.

The software gives you the versatility to deliver invoices in any way you like – job-by-job, in batches, or consolidate numerous jobs onto one invoice each calendar month. The frequent billing feature enables you to automate the invoicing process of regular maintenance contracts. You can add your own branding to invoice templates, or you can create your own invoice design from scratch. It’s super easy to send invoices out by email, so you can go paperless too. The software is easy to use and will save you heaps of time. It’s perfectly feasible to raise a job, allocate that job to an engineer, who gets the task completed and signed off, and get the job invoiced all in the same day! And Joblogic can export invoice and payment data to all popular accounting packages, including Quickbooks and Xero.

Streamline your whole paperwork process, improve the productivity of your team out in the field, track jobs and gain complete visibility, and ensure everything gets billed and invoices go out on time. Book a demo call today to find out how Joblogic can help your business.