Raising an invoice and managing the payment status of your invoices, as well as finding the ones you need at the drop of a hat is not so easily done if you’re working with Word or Excel invoice templates.
As your invoices pile up, making sure you keep them organised and moving them from one file to another so that you can keep track of payments made or missing can become not only time-consuming but also complex and messy.
Creating and organising invoices with invoicing software
Today, online programmes aim to make it easy for entrepreneurs and small businesses to not only create invoices quickly and easily but also make keeping track and updating the status of invoices as simple as scanning a page.
When creating a new invoice in Debitoor, instead of needing to enter the customer and product details in manually each and every time, you can simply select them from the drop down menus and the field will auto-fill. A few small adjustments if necessary and your invoice is ready to go.
This might sound too good to be true. It’s not - Debitoor invoicing software your data and your customers' is saved in your account and each new invoice raised automatically applies the next invoice number of your sequence, as well as the date the invoice is issued and your due date based on standard payment terms or those saved to a particular customer profile.
Always up-to-date: your invoice overview
With invoicing comes admin work. Maintaining a solid overview of your invoices: which have been sent to the customer, which are partially or fully paid, and if any payments are overdue, can quickly get out of hand with Excel or Word invoices. You could use folders or an Excel spreadsheet.
In an accounting and invoicing programme like Debitoor, this is taken care of and updated automatically: your invoices marked as ‘Sent’ as soon as they’ve been emailed to your customer, ‘Viewed’ when your customer has opened them, ‘Partial’ if you have entered a partial amount, and ‘Paid’ if the amount on the invoice has been paid in full.
Allowing you to see at a glance which invoices need attention, which customers to follow-up with by perhaps sending a reminder, and which are all set to archive.
Automatic payment matching
Traditionally, it was necessary to invoice a customer, wait, receive a payment to your bank account, wait for the bank statement, then match the payment to the corresponding invoice.
Debitoor cuts this process down and automates it as much as possible. By connecting an online payment option such as PayPal, your customer will have the option to pay your invoice immediately, online, and the payment will be directly matched to the corresponding invoice as soon as the payment is processed.
On our larger plans, automatic bank reconciliation allows you to upload a bank statement, and all amounts are matched automatically to the invoice or expense in moments.
Invoice filters to find your invoice fast
If you need to find a particular invoice in a long list, it still can take a little while. But by using Debitoor’s search and filter functions, you can narrow that list down to find the invoice you need in just a few clicks, saving you time and headaches.
In Word and Excel, the same process would require scrolling one-by-one through all your invoices in your folder or lists, and that’s only if you’re sure it’s in the right place (did you remember to move it over to the partial payments folder when you received the first payment? Or to the overdue folder when the due date passed without payment?).
Convert quotes to invoices and copy them instantly
An invoicing and accounting programme can offer a few other time-saving tricks. If you create a quotation for a customer and it is approved, you can convert it to an invoice immediately, instead of having to create a new one from scratch like you would in Word or Excel.
If you sell the same product and same amounts to several customers, you can simply copy an old invoice, select the customer from the drop down menu, and the rest is taken care of - the invoice number, issue date and due date are all updated automatically.
