Technology allows the streamlining of every process from procurement through marketing, sales and fulfillment. So why are some businesses still using their precious resources on manually reporting, billing, and chasing payments when Comment Selling through social media?
We think it’s high time to ditch manual invoicing. Here are 6 good reasons why you should get this process automated or get left behind:
1. It’s a huge time sink
There’s a reason that this is a least favorite task of all employees. It’s tedious, difficult, and, most of all, time consuming. Tracking an order from cradle to grave is a true undertaking and a necessary task when selling goods online.
Think of the time it takes to receive an order confirmation, recording that confirmation, creating the invoice, sending the invoice, waiting for payment, receiving payment, and sending a receipt for that payment. This is a labor intensive, multi-step process for each individual order. If you’re processing dozens of invoices a day, it’s going to take a lot of hours, patience, and dedication.
2. Manual invoicing is prone to human error
“Good enough” isn’t enough for data entry. Invoicing data will be the foundation of your company’s financial forecasting, record keeping, and customer service. Accuracy is absolutely necessary to all of these things. Duplicate entries, missing information, miscalculations can all can all lead to disastrous mismanagement of your company.
It can also easily crumble your brand’s reputation. If customers aren’t receiving correct amounts of money or items on their invoices, you’re going to have some very disgruntled customers to say the least. Bad customer experiences can do a world of damage to brand image.
3. Slow invoicing leads to abandoned carts & payment chasing
You can’t expect timely payment without timely invoicing. The two work hand in hand. It doesn’t stop at commenting “sold”. Order status will hinge on your efforts to provide a carted tally of items and costs. If there is no invoice, there can be no payment.
Invoices instill a sense of urgency to the receiving party. Hopefully your invoicing will be quick enough to convince customers to make payment right away. But as they say, out of sight, out of mind. Invoices can go ignored if they are not sent in a timely manner.
4. Waitlists are near impossible to maintain
In the event that a customer doesn’t pay, wouldn’t you like to put those items in the hands of the next person who is willing to? A waitlist is a queue designed for this scenario.
Recording order statuses will allow you to see what inventory is free for waitlisters. However, manual processing is not an effective way of keeping up with this.
Ask yourself this- How will you juggle order status with every item, every customer, with every sale? This is a very complex and near impossible mission without automation.
5. Positive check out experiences are greatly diminished
Technology has made consumers come to expect a very easy and immediate response in their shopping experience. They crave instant gratification.
The more time and effort out process requires, the more frustrated your customers will feel and the less likely they are to foot the bill. Nobody wants to endure a lengthy and complex check out, least of all your customers.
6. It’s costly
As a business owner, your time and your money are both very valuable resources. Yes, you can do manually invoicing yourself, but you’re taking away time from other equally important aspects of your business.
You could get a staff member to do it, but you’re also accruing costs for labor. And as long as you’re manually invoicing, you’ll be paying a small fortune with all the hours that it takes to get the job done.
The Takeaway
Simply put, manual invoicing is outdated, tedious, frustrating, ineffective, and costly. Automated invoicing will eliminate repetitive, wasteful tasks, improve on data accuracies, and enhance customer’s check out experiences.
Adopting auto-invoicing can help alleviate the pain of manual invoicing while boosting productivity and your bottom line. As they say, work smarter, not harder.
