Why is the New Retail Trend Shifting Towards E-Invoicing?
Published: 2020-12-01 05:49:33

Are you still working with the manual methods and dealing with piles of paper invoices? While you must have realized sometimes that e-invoicing is a better way to go for you, your customers, and your suppliers. However, some of your suppliers don’t seem to agree with this because they still prefer old school ways of doing business. But, there are numerous benefits to be gained in this digital era by shifting away from pen and paper and manual-based invoice processing to more digitized approaches.

As with adopting any automation method, the cost savings that can be accomplished from digital invoicing will vary based upon the starting point. Organizations that only send paper invoices via post will get the most savings.

“E-invoicing is the present and the future of invoicing.”

Going on further, there are multiple reasons why e-invoicing is better as compared to traditional paper invoices. That’s why we have listed some of the most compelling reasons why you should be switching to e-invoicing right now.

– Reduced costs
 – Increased accuracy and efficiency
 – Faster processing and payment cycles
 – Focus on higher priority activities
 – Enhanced accounts reconciliation
 – Improved cashflow
 – Reduced fraud, duplicates, and late payment fees
 – Improved dispute handling
 – Improved supplier/vendor relationships
 – Optimized community management
Let’s discuss a few of these, one by one:

Reduced Costs

Using an e-Invoice saves you a large amount of money as compared to old paper invoices. Using a digital invoice, you don’t have to pay for the paper to print the details every time or the postage cost required for you to send out your invoices to your customers. Regarding an e-invoice, it saves you money in the grand scheme of things because it will need less time for your information to be entered into accounting accounts or registers separately.

For instance, if we look back into 2013, the United States treasury estimated that if e-invoicing was implemented across all the government offices, it could have reduced the costs by 50% and saved $450 million annually.

Increased Efficiency & Accuracy

E-Invoicing uses new, automated, and intelligent procedures to reach better results than manual ones. As well as enabling a significant saving of the time dedicated to staff members, here’s a lot more than you can achieve with an invoice management system.
Reduction of repeated tasks and duplication: A single dedicated system oversees the whole process, and it works a lot faster than the human mind.

Easy and fast integration with other applications: Given the automated categorization and classification process, merging several unnecessary fields, invoices are quickly arranged, and multiple links with other documents are created.

Fast Processing and Improved Payment Cycles

Here’s another great benefit of e-Invoicing. Same as other advantages, document and procedure digitalization significantly reduces the time required. In e-invoices, payments are fastened up, and a significant portion of collection times are reduced. As payment is almost immediate and e-invoices can be tracked and monitored easily, here’s why people are shifting towards e-invoicing. 

E-invoicing cuts off the processing and approval times, resulting in more payments received on time—or even early. As noted earlier, it is almost a matter of seconds to email invoices, and they’re even faster if you use recurring billing. No longer will you be waiting months for a client to receive, review, and return an invoice via slow mail.

With e-invoicing, “Lost in the mail” episodes (and jokes) are gone forever. 

Your invoices are sent, collected, and recorded instantly. Invoices sent faster and faster means compensation is also received quicker and quicker.

Better Use of Staff

By submitting invoices electronically, staff members can save time printing and posting physical invoices and utilize that time into faster collections and better customer relations. Probably the most significant benefit that online invoicing has offered is automation. It means that you can set-up recurring payments for long-term subscriptions. That’s how you can successfully establish a subscription-based business model.

The automation software sends follow-ups emails and payment reminders for upcoming and past-due invoices. Automating these littlest of tasks saves you a ton of time and money, and you can focus on growing your business. Save yourself from paying someone to do these administrative tasks for you. It also cuts off the frustration of chasing down these payments.

Easier Auditing

A cloud invoicing system allows you to save a lot of things. Your estimates, tickets, invoices, expense receipts, and other related documents are kept safe online and in one dashboard. This one-information-screen creates a time-saving and straightforward process when going through financial reports. Thus, quickly locating all your major expenses, savings, and receipts from one place are convenient.

24/7 Availability

All the e-invoices are saved in the cloud, which gives you the ability to manage customer information and billing from one application. It can be anything, either your laptop, desktop, tablet, or smartphone.

It means you don’t have to be in the office all the time. Even if you can’t make it to the office, you’re at home, in a restaurant, or traveling; you can send and manage your invoices 24/7.
Speaking of the cloud, you should forget about losing invoices or any other essential data due to human error. You do not face mail problems or computer crashing issues. Everything is automatically saved and stored online. Just log into your system, and everything you need to start billing your clients is right at your fingertips.

Real-time Invoice Tracking

Online time tracking helps in creating accurate invoices that can be conveniently sent to clients. It is incredibly helpful for the businesses which bill their customers on a time and material basis. For such people, time tracking ensures that they never wrongly charge their clients.
Billing accuracy is always crucial in maintaining long-term relationships with customers.

Time tracking not only helps with customer billing, but it’s also handy in accurately computing payroll. The system generates timesheets which employers can use in their computations. Even if your team works in shifts, most of the time-tracking systems can handle payroll efficiently.