A recent report by the McKinsey group suggests that around 45% of activities across business organisations that are paid for can be carried out by automation tools. According to the same report, this can result in overwhelming savings of nearly 2 trillion dollars spent on salaries and wages. Small IT startups will be a major beneficiary if these paid tasks are automated as saving money on various mundane tasks will create more room for innovation for such companies.
Invoicing and billing tasks across companies constitute a huge amount of productive time that are paid for. By automating such tasks, not only a considerable cost can be saved but also the productivity of a company can be given a significant boost. The best thing is that any business can hire a custom software development company for the purpose without spending a fortune. Moreover, many freelancers and service providers working with IT companies have to wait for less time for getting paid. This will enhance the overall productivity, quality of work and facilitate a happy working environment.
Let us now explain the key advantages of using custom billing software by IT companies.
Why IT Firms Should Opt for Custom Billing?
From the above-mentioned description and the mentioned statistics and reports, the benefits of custom billing software are already apparent. Well, for small IT firms and startups these advantages are even more rigorous since they often need to run a development company with too many budget constraints.
Let us explain here some of the key reasons IT companies should opt for custom billing software.
Efficient Billing and Invoicing for Subscription Services
Many IT companies and IT service providers who provide subscription-based services have a huge load of billing tasks that they need to deal with at the back office. They need to maintain customers across different subscription plans and make billing for them as per the plan duration. This involves huge and continuous tasks corresponding to the calculation of usage for different subscription plans. Automated billing software can take off the entire load of these tasks and make managing subscription easier.
Such automated billing software is particularly beneficial for companies billing customers based on the usage volume. If an IT service needs to make billing as per the usage volume with different upper and lower limits for rate brackets, the manual billing process can really be time consuming and complex. This is where billing or invoicing software can just provide the ideal solution.
Minimising Administrative Roadblocks
Most companies that depend on manual invoicing and billing process make service providers, remote employees and freelancers suffer from delayed payments because of the number of complexities involved in evaluating the invoices and processing payments. On the other hand, standardising invoicing process can reduce the entire load of administrative tasks. Thus helps IT firms to save more productive time that can be invested with employee hours in development projects.
Reducing Human Errors
Unlike the manual invoicing process an efficient automated invoicing software is capable of calculating and compiling different costs and rates in an efficient mechanism to produce invoice based on this pool of data. This drastically reduces the scopes of human errors while saving a lot of business hours, processing delay and wages spent on billing tasks.
Integrated Billing System
Automated billing software helps to bring together and connecting different systems, processes and admin tasks corresponding to the collection of payment, evaluation of contributed work, and financial process. With an integrated system connecting billing software with CRM, ERP and other enterprise software solutions, the process becomes more efficient.
Transparent Billing Process
The transparency in billing and invoicing process is very important to ensure optimum integrity for a company. A non-transparent billing process that cannot explain certain omissions, billing criteria or attributes may appear as non-trustworthy and hence can pull down the reputation of the company. The professional billing and invoicing software solutions are built to follow the guiding principles regarding taxation, standard procedures and a cleaner invoice format to ensure optimum transparency.
Make Reporting Easier
With integrated billing software making comprehensive reports for different processes also becomes easier and effortless. The integrated billing software solution helps to generate well documented and detailed reports for the customers. A billing software coming with value-added features such as custom dashboard, real-time billing updates and notifications for threshold limits can just help to deliver updated reports for faster and easier data processing.
Key Attributes of Invoicing Software Needed by IT Startups
Now that the key advantages of the billing software are explained, we need to understand the key features and attributes of professional invoicing software that can be used by small IT firms and IT startups. There are several key considerations including ease of integration and use, less operational and procurement cost and scalability of the software solution.
There are dozens of billing software reduces in the market that can be used by brands across all niches including IT firms and development startups. While you can always take the example of other IT firms and choose one used by your competitors, you can also look for certain features and characteristics that can be befitting for your billing purpose.
Let us have a quick look at the key requirements that an efficient billing software must fulfil in order to be considered useful for an IT company.
- Lower procurement and maintenance cost
- Lower learning curve and ease of maintenance
- Adaptive to mobile platforms.
- User-optimised interface
- Capability to customise the software tasks, filters and billing parameters
- Capability to integrate with the existing software systems in place
All these capabilities, features and service offerings are crucial parts of any efficient invoicing software. Before you hire dedicated developer building custom software development, you need to make a list of features and capabilities you want. Faster invoice generation, control of payment processing, working with a customer base, maintaining accounts and ability to print documents are some of the key qualities that a custom billing software should have.
Conclusion
Invoicing or billing software will be an irreplaceable part of the IT administration and billing process in the years to come. Already a majority of IT firms partly or fully comply with this requirement and the trend tends to go bigger and louder in the coming days.
