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E-Invoicing: Quick, Sustainable Payback…Technology with Tartan IS Sending our invoices via email has improved our cash flow by reducing our debtor days by 25% whilst also dramatically cutting the cost of sending every invoice by £1.28, saving us £100/month. Last year, after having suffered one too many Belfast postal strikes, we began to look into ways that we could continue to send out our invoices independent of the Royal Mail. Being a computer company, we looked to see what technology was at hand and discovered that we could simply email our invoices from our SAGE line 50 accounts package. At that stage, circa 2007, it was version 12.0 and up until that point we had always printed and posted our invoices. Initial Considerations When Setting Up e-Invoicing 1. Would our customers accept their invoices via email? Surprisingly enough, we thought it may be too radical a step, when we emailed our customers to discuss what we were planning we were met with: 'Great idea', 'No problem, lots of our suppliers already send us email invoices', 'Oh that sounds novel, go ahead'. In fact, out of 80 regular customers, only two asked to continue receiving invoices through the post. Encouraged by our customers' response we asked 'Who should we send these invoices to?' In most cases it was the same accounts contact that we had always dealt with but in some cases we were asked to send to another colleague or a specially set-up email address mailto:accounts@customer.co.uk . Having established who to send our e-Invoice to we then turned our attention as to how it appeared in our customers' INBOX. Primarily that was because we used pre-printer letterhead with our logo, registered address and VAT details. That meant we then had to replicate those details in our e-Invoice, no straightforward task as it entailed us getting to grips with SAGE's Report Designer. If you've ever had to use it you'll know what I mean. After a few attempts I think we managed to get it right for our needs and it was greatly enhanced by being able to send it as a PDF, which meant that it could be easily read and unable to be changed after sending. See what I mean by having a look for yourself. Finally, SAGE has the facility to run 'repeating invoices', which greatly cuts down on the work in producing consistent monthly, quarterly and annual invoices. Business Benefits We Have Gained From e-Invoicing Our invoices now go out quicker and more regularly than before, unaffected by postal strikes, which means our cash flow is not adversely impacted. In fact, being able to invoice quicker and easier has now improved our cash flow as producing invoices takes much less time, are less laborious and are now not the job that was previously put off until the end of the month. Total = £1.28/invoice - this means, based on 80 invoices, we're saving approximately £100/month in material costs and time. Garry MacDonald is Managing Director of Tartan Information Solutions. Tartan IS offers reliable outsourced IT Services to companies that have little or no in-house IT expertise. Garry can be contacted to provide further information on the above or to book a free IT Audit by phone on 028 9094 5542, online at www.tartanis.co.uk or by email The content of this article is provided for information purposes only and does not constitute professional or other advice. |
