Invoice Mistakes Small Businesses Need To Avoid

Being proactive and on top of your finances is central to the success of a small business. Ensuring that money is being turned over and received on time is imperative where cash flow is concerned, and if you’ve any chance of growing your business and expanding to increase profitability, your management of money has to be well organised and timely, or you could end up costing yourself needless time and money, which could harm long term prospects.

One easy way of naturally boosting just how well your finances operate is to prioritize and keep on top of invoicing. While it can be a time consuming and laborious task, falling back on invoicing or allowing them to become disorganized and hard to follow up on is far from a good idea, as that will have knock on effects that will slow productivity, efficiency and work flow. Even those who think their organisation or invoicing is good can get better – so we’ve listed a few ways in which you could look at taking your intermetal processes to the next level.

 Don’t Forget To Invoice

While it may seem like an overly simplistic note, the easiest changes are often the ones most overlooked. Invoicing on time can be a pain – they aren’t very fun to generate, finding the right point of contact can be tricky, and chasing them up once sent is a chore in itself, but that’s all a very necessary evil. You can cut down time by giving yourself saved templates to follow, and setting aside time to do more than one at once, rather than approaching them on an ad-hoc basis. That way you’ll be on top of when they’ve been sent, when they need chasing, and when you should be expecting payment.

Adopt Invoice Discounting

A way of freeing up cash that is tied up in unpaid invoices, invoice discounting is one option available to businesses allowing working capital to be realized from outstanding invoices, whilst streamlining the burden of the invoices. Ensuring that no money is sitting outside of the business for longer than is needed – keeping your books looking as healthy as possible – it is a way of accommodating for third party delays and tardiness.

Include Unique Reference Numbers

With a high volume of invoices to deal with, it’s often difficult to keep track of them – especially if your clients or customers are giving you outstanding issues from previous months. A way to simplify this is to include unique reference numbers on each invoice sent and received, save files in accordance with that and have a record of which reference refers to which invoice. You’ll immediately notice a difference.