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The lost art of the Invoice: 10 Commandments for Invoicing

Topic: Business Management,Contact Management,Inventory Management,Invoicing,Tech Tools | Comments (4)

Posted on September 7, 2010 by admin

An invoice is so much more than just a template for collection, it is the delivery tool for the most essential function of running a sustainable business, getting money into your bank account! Once you’ve sold your product or service, you need to actually, physically collect that revenue for all your hard work to count. As an accounting software, we at WorkingPoint see a special elegance and art in streamlining the process of collection with online invoicing.

The art of the invoice is not about customizing your invoice templates to make them look fancy or over designed. In fact,  we don’t think you should waste any of your valuable time fiddling with customizing the look of your template. The simplicity of the invoice’s humble cousin, the receipt, is testimony to how little frills the invoice really needs for it’s true purpose: collection of revenue, tracking inventory, and record keeping. The lost “art” of the Invoice is about streamlining the process of invoicing down to only it’s most essential steps, and eliminating any unnecessary steps, clutter, time wastage and inefficiencies that have recently given invoicing such a bad name.

We’re hoping that you’ve already simplified your life by ditching that excel spreadsheet you were using to keep your books in favor of a time saving business software and that this cleansing process has left you filled with the excitement that comes from streamlining your essential business functions. Now you are ready for the next step…

What should be a desirable task (getting money!) has somehow become the black sheep of business management and we are ready to change that. These commandments are dedicated to purging unnecessary steps from the noble task of invoicing. No more will we tolerate additional tasks that drain valuable time from other business functions. No more will we fuss unnecessarily with our collections but instead focus on getting them out and getting our essential revenue reinjected into our businesses!

10 Commandments for Invoicing

1) Thou shalt not spend more than 4 minutes on each invoice.

2) Your invoice shall automatically reflect the goods sold as an inventory adjustment in your inventory management software.

3) Thou shalt automatically save the new contact in your customer management software, when you create an invoice with new contact info.

4) Invoices shall automatically populate thine invoice reports, profit loss reports and other business/accounting reports.

5)  CRM shall automatically fill in saved contact info throughout thine invoice once it’s been saved.

6) Invoices shall automatically populate your accounting software with all relevant data related to your business.

7) Thou shalt, whenever possible, employ paperless billing to save money on printing costs and postage.

8&#41 Thou shalt convert thy invoice into a sendable email with one click

9) Thou shalt automatically save a copy of every invoice sent

10) Invoicing shall be accessible from anywhere with internet access/computer or smartphone