Emailed Invoices

How Emailed Invoices Can Help You Get Paid Faster

Cash flow is everything, and one of the biggest keys to success in business is keeping accounts receivable to a minimum. The faster your invoices get paid, the healthier your company’s finances will be, and the better you’ll sleep at night. That means using any tool that can help you collect payment faster is a no-brainer. Email invoices are one such tool, and luckily, some payment gateways build free email invoicing tools right into their platforms. Taking advantage of them is a great way to reduce the amount of work that goes into invoicing and account management, and to speed up the arrival of your payments.

Save Time and Get Paid Faster

Sending invoices via email allows you to get your payment requests out faster, and the more prompt you are in sending an invoice, the more prompt the payment of that invoice will be. Using the invoicing features included with payment gateways like Authoirze.Net and PayTrace allows you to send fully customized, branded invoices in a matter of minutes, right from within your customer account. 

Not only does that help you get your invoices out (and payment back in) faster, it also saves you time by eliminating a lot of the work involved with manually creating and sending traditional invoices. Many customers also prefer email invoicing, as going paperless is good for the environment and doesn’t result in a pile of unwanted paper bills that have to be dealt with. 

 

Never Lose Track of Payment Status

Manually managing invoices isn’t only time-consuming, it’s also inaccurate. The more invoices you send out, the more likely it is you’ll lose track of any given invoice’s status. As a result, it’s not uncommon for merchants with high invoice volumes to be unaware when one of their invoices goes unpaid, and an invoice that hasn’t been identified as overdue can’t be followed-up on.

The email invoicing features built into payment gateways clearly display the status of each and every invoice, and automatically update it to reflect payment or cancellation. That means you don’t have to spend any time doing housekeeping on your invoice trackers, and that you’ll be able to quickly identify which of your invoices are overdue. 

 

Automate Follow-Ups

Sometimes an overdue payment is a simple matter of a forgetful customer, and the problem can be easily remedied with a friendly reminder. That makes following-up incredibly important as a collection tool. Manually following-up works fine – if you remember to do it. Automating follow-up is a much better practice, and some payment gateways allow merchants to set multiple automatic reminders. 

For instance, Authorize.Net’s invoicing function allows merchants to send two automatic reminders – one five days prior to the invoice coming due, and one the day after. That ensures that the customer knows that it’s time to pay, and gently prods them if the payment doesn’t come in on time. That kind of proactive collection is essential to get paid on time, with as little fuss as possible. 

 

At BAMS, we work with a number of payment gateway companies that offer simple, easy-to-use email invoicing tools, and we’d love to chat with you about how they can help clear up your receivables and maximize your cash flow. Call us today to find out more about how we can help your business get set up with the right electronic payment solution at the lowest possible cost.