Electronic - Invoicing

Introduction

The growing number of start-up, small, and medium businesses is recognizing that the correct utilization of resources will reduce your overheads and improve the efficiency of your supply chain. In addition, automating your administration activities and considering regulatory laws will reduce your operational costs while benefitingfrom governmental tax incentives.

Realizing your Overheads

As your business grows, increasing administrative tasks including creating invoices, maintaining customer details, billing your customers, tracking payments, tracking inventory, reporting on your sales, and accounting (the entire process is referred to as sales management) will become time consuming and costly. So if you are currently using a manual sales system then anticipate that 1-2% of your business day, per customer transaction, will be spent performing administrative tasks such as creating, generating and sending quotes, orders, and invoices.  Putting this in perspective, if your business deals with 10 clients per day over a one month (20 working days) period, then your administrative costs equates to 32 hours (2% X 10 clients X 8 hours X 20 days) or 640$ (assuming a minimal 20$ hourly rate) per month. Therefore, do not be surprised if you questionyour manual system in the first two months of your start-up; by the third month you will recognizeyour administrative activities will start impacting your focus on core and revenue generating activities. So start considering ways to improve your sales management process by reducing administrative overheads.

Improved Sales Management

As a small to medium business it is important to maximize your resources (meaning reduced invisible and administrative costs) to ensure predominant focus on revenue generation activities such as sales and quality delivery.  Therefore, the correct choice and use of sales management systems, processes, and tools willimprove the efficiency of your business:

•    Maximize cash flow using an electronic and automated invoicing solution.  These digital systems eliminate the need for paper invoices, create electronic invoices while on the go, and schedules re-occurring invoices to be sent automatically resulting in an improved settlement process.