With more freelancers and small business owners offering their services to a huge diversity of businesses all over the country and the world, there’s been a growing need for a more effective billing solution that will get the invoices into the hands of customers and clients quickly and easily without resorting to traditional paper methods.
Using paper invoices has led to many headaches, including late payments or no payment at all. There are a variety of reasons for this, namely that paper invoices take a long time to get to their recipient, they get lost in the mail or the unwanted invoices pile up on desks, and typically require some type of paper payment that takes even longer to receive and can also disappear reducing cash flow.
In the meantime, the freelancer or small business owner is waiting days, weeks, and sometimes months to get their payments. This issue may not be critical to a large corporation, it is however, critical to a freelancer and small business owner. A stack of unpaid bills means much lower cash flow, which can inhibit business continuity, credit scores, and reinvestment in growing company needs. Additionally, the business owner is spending more time trying to collect the money rather than making money for future growth, or paying a secretary, office manager or accountant to do this service for them.
Migrating From Paper to Digital Process for Invoicing
Online invoicing platforms like Due.com are changing the rules of the invoicing game for freelancers and small business owners by offering a more convenient and fast way to get an invoice in the hands of a customer or client, removing paper from the process, and increasing the likelihood of getting paid much faster. Here’s how the Due.com online invoicing solution can work for you – including how business owners can use Due and why they have selected this company as a way to improve their cash flow.
Founded in 2015, Due is relatively new to the online invoicing world but employs the latest technology built on an existing, proven platform for providing estimates and invoicing, time tracking, and expense management. The focus of this online invoicing solution is to make it as easy as possible for the small business owner, freelancers, and their clients and have this billing option be as visually attractive as possible.
Online Invoicing Platform Features
Built around a beautiful interface and dashboard, the online invoicing platform offers multiple features that help business owners handle all their invoicing and expense needs. Here are the features that help a business owner better manage their invoicing tasks:
- More business is being conducted across geographical borders than ever before because of the advent of online communications. These online communications help facilitate our relationships across boarders better than ever before. However, invoices sometimes require payment options in different currencies or languages. It is well to note that Due.com now supports over 100 different currency and tax systems as well as languages. Clients appreciate receiving an invoicing in their own language and currency so they can better handle payment actions on their end that align with their accounting systems. Having options in your own language is a business issue worth paying attention to. You want the best for your clients.
- Many small business owners and freelancers have not thought about building their brand across all aspects of their business, including expanding worldwide. With Due’s online invoices, business owners can brand their invoices and create a much more professional look to their billing, including drag and drop functionality for adding a logo and coordinating the color and font of the invoice with their brand. With a library of invoice templates available, a business owner can find just the right look to suit their brand’s invoices in both look and feel.
- One of the most time-consuming aspects of creating invoices each month is entering the same data on each invoice. With a database that holds client information, including name, address, and email address, the information can be automatically entered rather than manually typed each month. This cuts out errors associated with manual labor. With further integration of task information attached to each client and connection to BaseCamp, a business owner can save considerable time and effort on entering this information plus they are less likely to let human errors adversely impact invoice accuracy.
- Further time can be saved when it comes to invoices that are the same each month, such as those linked to a retainer relationship or subscription arrangement with a client. Due.com’s online invoicing system offers the ability to generate and send recurring invoices automatically.
- Business owners also enjoy the ease of payments through many different payment options including DueCash, PayPal and other integrations and even the ability to receive ACH payments to a designated bank account. A freelancer can embed the invoices into their website so a client can stay on the website the entire time to view and pay the invoice, making the billing and payment options even more convenient.
- With so many day-to-day tasks to focus on, the overall performance of a company can go untracked. With Due.com’s dashboard, a business owner can instantly see what projects are in progress, which invoices have been paid or are outstanding, tax totals and what projects and invoices are coming up in the near future. The online invoicing system also offers reporting capability to assess time spent on projects versus amount of payment to gauge company performance and determine areas that may need improvement.
- Due.com offers highly responsive technical support to ensure that no issue will stop a business owner from getting their billing done in the most efficient and effective way possible.
Using Online Invoicing to Improve Business Cash Flow
A business owner can stay organized in terms of their clients, projects, and tasks, automating much of the process of tracking these business components. This minimizes the amount of time spent on these non-revenue tasks while speeding up the delivery of invoices to clients on a platform they will more likely view and respond to favorably, over paper invoices.
The online delivery of invoices to a client’s email means that the client can view the invoice on their own computer, laptop, tablet or smartphone on the run, and the client simply clicks on a link to view the invoice and pay for it through the multiple online methods provided- all at the same time. Allowing ease of effort to the freelancer or small business owner in their billing process and making the execution of paying an invoice this easy, means that clients are more likely to go ahead and pay for their invoice immediately, right while they are thinking about it, or very soon after they receive the invoice.
Elimination of the operation of receiving an envelope in the mail – where the invoice gets placed in a pile on a desk or inbox, with the accompanying potential of being forgotten about, or at the very least put off – Due offers a simple solution to this problem so that freelancer, small business owner and the client can equally finish their business transactions with ease of motion on both ends.
The difference in speed of payments will always impact upon a company’s cash flow. The sooner a payment is made for services rendered, the more cash is available in the bank for a business to operate. Growing a business takes paying for your expenses as well as to investing in further marketing tactics, purchase of new equipment, and other options that adds services, or expands business operations. Most importantly, this quicker, increased cash flow keeps the business afloat, offering the most compelling reason why a business owner would choose to use an online invoicing system like Due.com.
