Have you ever thought about investing in digital or electronic invoicing? There are numerous benefits associated with digital invoicing, and understanding these isn’t always easy. Nonetheless, our friendly experts here at LiderTax are on hand to help you understand how digital invoice systems work and why these might be a better fit for your operations.
Using Digital Invoice Systems to Streamline Operations
Digital invoice systems offer many great benefits. As such, they’re excellent options to consider if you’re tired of constantly digging through piles of paperwork. However, it’s not innately clear how they could be beneficial for your business.
The main way that digital invoice systems can help streamline operations is for taxes and financial management. With digital systems, all of your paperwork is stored in one place. As such, you won’t need to worry about continually digging through massive piles of paperwork to find the information needed.
What’s more, electronic invoicing systems also offer another great benefit: they make it much easier to send invoices. Since you’ll have a template ready for each sale, you won’t need to manually create the invoice each time. In turn, this can save a huge amount of time, especially if you draw up multiple invoices per day.
What if Customers Still Want Paper Invoices?
In some cases, your customers may still want paper invoices after you switch to electronic invoicing. However, they can’t necessarily demand a particular type of invoice; it all depends on the type of invoicing system your business uses. Fortunately, if this is the situation you find yourself in, there are a few options you could consider.
Of course, there’s nothing to say you have to provide paper invoices. However, not doing so could impact the customer experience, leaving clients looking to competitors for a better standard of service. So, while you still need to adhere to regulations (requiring you to provide either digital or paper), always take care. There are ways to prevent the customer experience from suffering due to the change.
Running a Controlled Trial
So, if you decide to issue paper invoices, you can try a few things. If you’ve only just switched, you can potentially issue both paper and digital invoices as part of controlled digital trials. However, once you have finished trialling the system, you’ll need to switch to digital invoices only.
Issuing a Paper Document (That’s Not Specifically a VAT Invoice)
Alternatively, you can continue offering a paper document with all the invoice information; however, you’ll need to put a note on the document stating that it is not a VAT invoice. In this case, the VAT invoice will still be digital, but the customer will have a copy to refer to.
Final Thoughts
If you usually send invoices through traditional methods, knowing about the different options available to you could really help. Just one such example is electronic invoicing. Indeed, this excellent solution can offer a wealth of benefits. As such, we highly recommend giving this a try if you’ve been looking for a new, more efficient way to send invoices to your clients and customers.
