How to Choose The Right Billing Software For Your Small Business

If you own or manage a small business, you know how much time can be spent chasing down paper invoices, purchase orders and sales reports. It can be a real nightmare! That is where best billing and invoicing software comes in. It allows you to record all your customers, sales, invoices, inventory, suppliers (and more) in a PC-based system that is easy to use.

Deciding that you need to invest in good quality best billing and invoicing software is not hard. The tricky part can be choosing the right software package for your requirements. There are dozens of systems on the market claiming to be the holy grail of all your business problems, but choosing the wrong one can cost you valuable time and money.

Here's a simple checklist of some things to look for when purchasing best billing and invoicing software for your small business:

Customer records

This is the core element of any billing system. What sort of information do you need to record about your customers? There's the obvious things like address, phone, fax, mobile, email and web address. But what about marketing-related information like "how did the customer find out about your business?", and "standard discounts" for key clients.

Multiple contacts & Communication history

If many of your clients are businesses with multiple contacts, can you record individual contact details for each person? Word of mouth is the most powerful form of advertising, and statistics show that one of the most important factors in customer satisfaction is good customer service. Have you thought about keeping a log of all communication with your customers? It can be extremely helpful for improving internal communication within your business, and results in a more personalized service for your clients.

Multiple shipments

Obviously your best billing and invoicing software will need to create sales orders - that's a game. But do you need to record employee-related information, like who the "salesperson" was? What about flexible dispatch options, like multiple shipments per sales order?

Search facility

There's no point recording all this really useful information if there's no easy way to get to it. Check that the search facility is flexible and easy to use. What criteria can you search by? Here are a couple useful fields you may want to use: customer phone number, customer address, order date, dispatch date and dispatch consignment number.

 Tax & regional support

 

Are you able to change the tax rates on an order line basis? What about currency formatting? If you and your clients are in Europe, then there's no point using best billing and invoicing software that can only handle US dollars.

Reporting

Producing accurate reports in seconds is something you no longer have to dream about. In fact it is a necessity in today's competitive market. Ensure your best billing and invoicing software can calculate information on sales based on date, salesperson and customer type.

If you operate a B2B business, another key performance indicator may be dispatch totals, based on date, and employee. But one important thing to remember about software... you can only get out what you put in. So if you are looking for a specific report, make sure that information is being recorded by your best billing and invoicing software package.