Boost Efficiency: Outsourcing Mailing Invoices

When a business internally manages printing and sending out its own invoices, marketing materials, and other business communications, there are many factors to consider when allocating resources and budget.

Typically, companies manage this task internally in two ways. If their volume is low, they will just manually have someone print on a regular office printer, hand stuff envelopes, and apply stamps. If they have more frequent and higher volumes, they may invest in a better printer, an inserting machine and/or a metering machine to apply postage in a more automated way.

Businesses’ invoice volumes often vary throughout the year. As invoice volumes fluctuate, leading to either idle resources or bottlenecks during peak periods, it is difficult to know whether it is cost effective to buy additional equipment, try to find more space for storage, and hire more employees to handle this operation.

Or the company may start growing consistently and outgrow its internal equipment capacities. So, one day the shop manager may face the issue of exceeding 100% of their equipment resources. When the volume starts reaching a certain percentage of your maximum possible capacity, let’s say 75 to 80 percent, it’s time to decide what to do next. Otherwise, your printing, inserting, and sealing equipment could become worn out and break down, causing costly delays in sending out invoices and advertising. Accounts receivable suffer, and marketing campaigns are postponed.

What can a business do? Under these circumstances, you may make choices that lead to overspending. You may decide to lease or buy another inserter and printer, hire a couple more people to print and prepare correspondence, buy more materials, and make other investments, maybe even rent more space. The expenses go up dramatically, while there is no guarantee that you will soon utilize the new equipment to a sufficient extent that it will not remain idle for prolonged periods.

Outsourcing the excess volume can be the better way to get out of the situation. In this article, let’s talk about the advantages of partnering with a service that specializes in this area and how it could offer a more balanced and budget-friendly approach to volume fluctuations and accommodating growth.

Why You Would Want to Go from Managing Mail Internally to Outsourcing

Easy scalability and flexibility are among the benefits of partnering with a print-to-mail company. One strategy is to completely outsource the whole operation and cancel the leasing of all equipment and space. But if you are not ready to go to this extent and have employees for whom this is their sole job, and you want to keep them, you can continue to run the process just like you used to and pass to the service provider only your excess volume. There are solutions that have no monthly contracts or minimum volume requirements, so you don’t need to calculate in advance how much you are going to outsource, and which monthly package you need to pay for. Instead of that, you can just upload the overflow of documents to the online platform whenever you need to, taking advantage of the provider’s infrastructure and resources without any additional investment in new equipment, supplies, and other aspects of the process. Isn’t it a huge relief for any manager when you can maintain your existing equipment and space and keep your team, but at the same time outsource all the extra volume and forget about the problem?

Even if you don’t have a dedicated staff for managing this essential operation, you can still benefit by outsourcing. Your team can instead focus on other important tasks, including their main responsibilities, without having to manually print and fold documents, then stuff and stamp envelopes, not to mention it eliminates the need for warehousing the materials needed.

Outsourcing allows you to quickly adapt to changes, ensuring that sending out your invoices is timely and accurate regardless of volume, and scaling your business operations efficiently. But let’s also talk about the other benefits it gives—and there are a lot to consider.

Noticeable Savings

One of the most apparent benefits of outsourcing this task to specialized providers is the potential for significant savings in costs and time. This includes bulk prices for materials, reduced manual labor for your team, and the convenience of the print-to-mail service handling transportation to the USPS for you.

Mailroom Outsourcing Services – Expertise and Professionalism 

By partnering with an experienced print-to-mail service provider, companies gain access to its expertise. This ensures high-quality printing, accurate inserting, efficient postage handling, and compliance with postal regulations and standards.

The best providers automate address verification and cleanup, envelope stuffing and sealing, and postage calculations, making the risk of an error minimal, which results in a lower chance of invoices arriving late or being lost.

Online solutions that don’t require contracts or extra fees for use give you more liberty and adapt to your needs dynamically. For instance, DocuSend enables you to send any quantity of documents, whether it's a single piece or a batch of thousands, for printing whenever the need arises.

DocuSend is a cloud-based mailroom, but it also has a powerful production center that stands behind it. Uploading a batch of your documents in PDF format to the online app, you get them printed with high-quality materials and sent via USPS for you within two business days. The program captures the address area in each personalized document or invoice, but it is also possible to upload a generic template and a CSV file with an address list.

Because DocuSend has all the professional high-speed equipment, it produces polished-looking documents and marketing pieces with printed addresses and Intelligent Mail barcodes, as well as optional remittance envelopes, remittance barcodes, and a perforated stub if you require. There is a variety of features to select from, like color or black-and-white printing, adding flyers, two-sided printing, plain or perforated paper, and various distribution options like first-class, certified, foreign, and marketing mail.

Beyond that, DocuSend gives an array of additional bonuses. Due to the Intelligent Mail barcode DocuSend puts under each address, delivery time is faster, which can speed up your customers’ response.

NCOA (National Change of Address) and address clean-up services are provided for every user at no additional charge. They help ensure the accuracy of recipient addresses by validating and standardizing addresses and comparing them to the NCOA database. This reduces the chances of having undeliverable items returned to you.

Mail Trail is a free tracking service that allows you to track the journey of each piece by the zip codes of the facilities it is scanned at, up to the final one.

Your personal report portal is a tool to track all your mailing history for the last 6 months.

The ups and downs of invoice volumes, equipment limitations, and ever-growing demands can lead to any business owner’s nightmare, but the decision to delegate mailing operations becomes a game-changer. Delegating to the pros lets them navigate the complexities for you so you don’t have to. Business owners can focus on what they do best while we handle all their correspondence with care!