Billing, it's all about the invoice

Let’s face it, you’re in business to make money.  Invoicing is how you monetize your product or service.  Think of it as the headwaters of your company’s river of cash.  The easier you make it for your customers to pay your bill, the faster you get paid. 

Collecting payment is easy when it’s one subscriber and one invoice per subscription.  That’s the business-to-consumer (B2C) model and it’s pretty well defined and people know what they’re getting.  As a vendor, your billing problem is simple. 

Life gets vastly more interesting and challenging when you start sending invoices to companies.  That’s the business-to-business model, or “B2B”.  Unlike a consumer, the B2B customer’s left hand (think “Accounts Payable Department”) usually doesn’t know what the right hands (the users of your product) are doing.  They rely on systems rather than memory, and your invoice has to work within their system, or payments will be delayed or stopped completely. 

In its most basic form, a business to business invoice has to communicate six things: 

• the seller’s identity
• what was purchased, usually by referencing a purchase order number and line number
• the value and how it was calculated
• taxes applied
• currency
• location and method of payment (electronic or physical)

 

Most consumers only care about the first, third and last points.  Businesses need them all, especially when the auditors arrive.  Things like corporate tax identifiers, company registration numbers and other information that looks needlessly bureaucratic is essential to getting your invoice through the maze of approvals and checks at the receiving end.  Even if payment is automatic, poor preparation of the invoice can lead to needless effort resolving issues that should never have come up in the first place.

Comments

[ria spark]

Sage Software has recently launched a free online invoicng tool for freelancers and small businesses at http://www.billingboss.com. Billing Boss is focused of keeping invoicing simple - so simple that you can get set up and send your first invoice in just a couple minutes.

Please note: With the goal of full disclosure, I work at Sage. Feel free to contact me if you have any feedback about Billing Boss.

[Stacy Lorsan]

I have been using the services of http://www.invoicera.com for quite sometime now and they are coming up with the new Invoicera with features like time-tracking, expense tracking, import function, and much more. Check out their blog at http://www.invoicera.com/blog for updates

Cheers!!!

[Mike Mitchell]

Recently i discovered HostBill - i ran small webhosting company and i really adore their default invoices template. We changed it a bit though - its easy html code to edit with some dynamic fields to add, also PDF invoices are available, and thats a big plus for billing softare. Check out http://hostbillapp.com - i think you can easily use this software for other purposes

[propecia online]

I like this text is very interesting: "Things like corporate tax identifiers, company registration numbers and other information that looks needlessly bureaucratic is essential to getting your invoice through the maze of approvals and checks at the receiving end..."

[invoice software]

Mr. Mike, I also discovered that Hostbill, and its very useful in making invoices.

-kim