Exploring Invoicing Software Solutions for Small Businesses

An invoice or a bill is a document or receipt that a seller provides to a buyer as written proof of a sales transaction. It usually includes the product code, name, quantity, payment terms, and the prices agreed to be paid. Invoices can be of various types [1] and play a major role in accounting internal controls and audits.

The traditional way of generating, printing, and giving paper invoices to customers can be costly, time-consuming, and less eco-friendly. As a result, online invoicing for small businesses can be considered useful. Online invoicing or e-invoicing is the process of using invoicing software solutions to automate the entire billing process. Such invoice management software can create a list of products and services along with their prices, generate bills using ready-made templates, and send them to customers via text messages or emails.

Here are a few benefits of e-invoicing to explain why invoicing software solutions may serve as a good alternative to the traditional billing process:

Consider having a system that is equipped to enter the following details on your behalf:

- Invoice number
- Product details (product name, code, color, quantity purchased, etc.)
- Date of invoice generation and product delivery
- Name and contact information of the buyer and the seller
- Payment details (cost breakdown, the amount due, the sum paid by the customer, the balance returned, payment due date, etc.)

Invoicing software solutions can perform all these, possibly creating invoices more quickly and accurately. This may solve the problem of slow payment processing faced by 33% [2] of SMBs (small and medium-sized businesses).

Research suggests that e-invoicing costs 60% [3] less than traditional paper invoicing. So in addition to saving your time, invoicing software solutions can also potentially reduce the costs incurred to prepare and print receipts.

There can be times when either you or your client forgets about paying off bills. This can lead to delayed payments, which may affect your cash flow management. Invoicing software for small businesses can solve this issue by scheduling and tracking repetitive and due payments as well as sending friendly reminders, if needed.

Invoice management software is equipped to sort and store all your invoices. In case you need to access them, all you need to do is search through an organized database and find the needed information within minutes.

Moreover, cloud-based invoicing software solutions give you easy access to invoice data from anywhere. This feature has been helpful when people started working remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Invoicing software solutions enter the aforementioned details on your behalf. This can reduce the chances of missing some information or entering wrong information – errors that are quite common if the process is completed manually.

Though invoice management software enters the needed details on your behalf, it also offers the flexibility to easily modify them as per your need. By making some basic changes in the software’s settings or editing the auto-filled information, you can easily customize every invoice.

Thanks to SSL encryption, invoice management software is very secure and safe to use. All e-bills sent from you to your clients are end-to-end encrypted, which minimizes the chances of any data leak.

Your invoices are a storehouse of sensitive data. If lost or misplaced, they can lead to several discrepancies. One of the benefits of e-invoicing is that it regularly backs up your data. So even in case of a crisis (system failure, malware attack, etc.), you can resort to a backup to rely on.

Online stores are not limited by physical boundaries. Through e-commerce marketplaces, you have the option to sell your products to customers in other countries. Billing software for small businesses is equipped to handle foreign currencies and generate invoices in different languages.

A survey conducted by the Federation of Finnish Financial Services revealed that the carbon footprint for a single online invoice is 33% lower than paper invoices. Therefore, shifting to e-invoicing may not only make economic sense to some – it is also eco-friendly!