When you’re a small business owner, you almost always start out being the one not only in charge of running the day to day operations, but also the sales, the marketing, and yes, even the accounting.
In other words, you’re balancing a lot and have multiple jobs all rolled into one. It’s exhilarating and challenging but can also feel like you have too many plates in the air.
Thankfully, we live in an age where online resources are plentiful and many are designed for exactly this situation - a freelancer or small business owner with a lot going on. And these resources are designed to make it easier for you to run your business.
Managing your customers
When you first start out you might just have a small handful of customers (or 1 or 2, we all start somewhere). But as your business grows and you begin to amass more and more orders and are also managing leads and suppliers, etc., you soon begin to realise that all that information needs to be stored in one place.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is a great resource for staying organised when it comes to current, potential, and former customer details. But this software often doesn’t include the financial side of your business.
Online accounting & invoicing software like Debitoor also allows you to store customer details including:
- Their name or the business name
- Address and country
- Phone number
- Special payment terms
- Any notes pertaining to that customer
Saving this information about your customer makes creating invoices even faster because their details auto-fill when you select them from the drop down menu.
Managing your accounts
But creating and sending invoices, quotes, and delivery notes for a customer is just one side of the sales process. The other side is registering payments, following up on overdue invoices, and managing any returns with a credit note or bad debt.
As you run your business, you might be doing repeat business with several customers and want to keep a close eye on the payments they’ve made, as well as any outstanding balances. For this purpose you can generate a customer account statement with a click.
How to create an account statement in Debitoor
You can generate a statement of account for any customer that you have saved in your account at any time, with just a click. The account statement includes the following for the full time you have had them saved as a customer:
- Invoices, including dates and amounts
- Credit notes, also including dates and amounts
- Payments made on invoices, also with dates
- Any remaining balance owed on invoices
To view the account statement of a customer, click on your ‘Contacts’ tab and click on the customer in your list for which you’d like to see the statement. When you open their account, you will see a button in the top right corner labeled ‘Account Statement’. Click this, and a PDF will automatically download to your computer.
It’s that easy! While customer account statements are typically used for internal purposes, you can even email it to a customer if they have requested a summary of their transaction history with your business.
