7 Reasons Why Your Business Should Use Billing Software

To achieve growth and success, businesses should complete their projects, workloads, or activities on time and ensure that they get paid by their clients quickly. This requires them to implement an optimized and streamlined billing process in which they can easily record and monitor the number of hours spent by their employees on jobs or tasks, effortlessly collect expense reports, create accurate invoices that they can send to clients in a snap, and perform accounting functions with ease.
However, the kind of billing process we can observe in many businesses today is often described as inefficient, tedious, and painful. This is because these businesses are relying heavily on papers, spreadsheets, or multiple disparate tools. For example, they might have an application whose sole function is to track employees’ work hours, but they still have to manually re-enter information to another separate application used for creating invoices.
Thanks to modern billing software solutions, advanced and automated tools make it possible for you to perform all your essential billing tasks from a single application. In fact, there are a lot of reasons why your business should leverage such tools aside from streamlining your billing process, such as the following:

A revolutionary online billing software can simplify your billing process because it integrates time tracking and invoicing into a single application. Normally, businesses are using Excel spreadsheets to record the hours spent by employees on project tasks or job-related activities. Then, they have to input the time entries into a billing, invoicing, or accounting system to generate invoices, copying and pasting pieces of information repeatedly.

When you are implementing an advanced and modern billing software, you no longer have to go through such a time-consuming and painful billing process. The software enables you to automatically import time entries in bulk to its system and rapidly create invoices out of these time entries without the need to move from one application to another. You can also email these invoices to your clients from within the same software.

Employee morale has a direct impact on how employees perform at work. Employees with high morale or those people who feel satisfied and happy in their work environment are more likely to work harder and perform more productively than their counterparts, as revealed by a study conducted by the University of Warwick with regard to the connection between happiness and employee productivity.

The researchers in the said study discovered a common pattern in four different experiments and noted that happy employees exhibited a 12% increase in their productivity. Modern billing software solutions are optimized to help you boost employee morale and performance.

For example, these tools allow you to gain insights into your employees’ timesheets and recognize and reward those employees who finished their jobs faster than what you’ve expected. This way, they will be able to feel happy and motivated to perform much better. On the other hand, you can schedule coaching and training sessions for slower employees who are struggling to complete their tasks, enabling you to show how much you care for them and help them overcome challenges at work.

Based on project management statistics published on 4pm.com, some organizations fail their projects at a rate of 70% or above. It’s pointed out that one reason for this is due to poor project planning on the part of executives, project managers, and project team members. For instance, project failures happen if executives and managers don’t set clear goals for their projects; nor do they apply the necessary techniques and methodologies to attain those goals. Meanwhile, project team members adjust project estimates inaccurately just to avoid blame.

Many invoice and estimate software tools include capabilities that permit you to formulate, execute, and evaluate project plans in an accurate and intelligent manner. With these tools, you’ll be able to go back to the timesheets and expenses submitted by employees for previous projects. Then, you can use them to generate accurate project estimates.

This means the tools give you the capability to determine how much time should be allocated to similar projects and what specific costs you might incur if you decide to work on such projects. In addition, by being able to leverage experiences derived from previous projects, you can find out which projects are more profitable and assign the right employees to these projects based on their skills.

Printing multiple copies of documents and sending them out to managers, authorized personnel, or clients is a tedious process and lets you incur expenses. This is a common practice for businesses that are implementing processes relying on heavy usage of papers. With online billing software, you can easily build a paperless environment.

For example, to generate timesheets and expense reports, you simply have to use templates built within the software, fill them up with the necessary information, and save them as drafts to be updated later on. This prevents you from compiling papers that get easily lost, misplaced, or destroyed. If you need to create invoices, the software also offers templates for such purpose. Once you’re done generating an invoice and attaching supporting electronic documents to it, you can quickly send it to your client online without the need to print any piece of paper.

Perhaps you are using an SMB payroll system to make the processing and running of employee payroll a breeze. Fortunately, a modern billing software with time tracking capabilities can be integrated with your existing payroll system so that your HR personnel gets the opportunity to automate their tasks when it comes to managing employee payroll.

This integration enables the billing software to transmit information to your payroll system in real-time. So how does this work? Let’s say when your employees inputs or updates time information within the billing software, the information will be automatically entered into your payroll system. What’s more, all the needed computations are performed without requiring assistance from HR personnel, which include benefits, taxes, and deductions.

Remote work has been embraced by a lot of organizations and businesses, outsourcing projects and jobs to contractors and freelancers overseas. In fact, it’s projected that by the year 2028, 73% of all departments or teams will be having their own remote workers already, as revealed in a study about the future of workforce quoted by Upwork, the world’s largest freelancing platform.

What’s great about this is that you can utilize billing software solutions to optimize remote team management in case you are currently applying such type of work approach. Through the aid of project management capabilities incorporated into these solutions, you can divide your projects into smaller tasks and assign them to team members found across various locations, making it easy for you to track project progress and employee performance. Remote employees can also submit timesheets and export reports, bill clients, and collect payments from anywhere.

Invoices Billing software tools permit you to produce an easy invoice that reflects your professionalism. You are provided with the ability to customize the look and feel of your invoices, letting you add your own company logo and apply colors that are consistent with your brand. Also, you can include important information and details in your invoices so your clients will be able to understand what they have to pay for or be reminded of the payment terms they have agreed upon.

Modern billing software solutions are equipped with advanced, innovative, and automated features that connect your billing process to other important aspects of your business which include employee time monitoring, employee engagement, expense reporting, project planning and management, and payroll processing.

Since all of these processes are integrated into a single application, you get the chance to focus more on increasing your revenues and growing your business instead of doing repetitive administrative tasks. A single billing software gives you full control over your business and helps you reach its full potential.