Top 6 Benefits of Automating Your Invoice Processing
Small business owners constantly juggle the daily demands of satisfying their existing customers while trying to grow their business. It’s a catch-22 as necessary day-to-day tasks make it hard to find time to step back and discover ways to become more efficient.
One of the most overlooked areas is simplifying your invoice processing. You need to get those billing statements out the door pronto in order to get paid! But sometimes it’s the last thing you have time for. Outsourcing can provide and escape from this dilemma. Here are six compelling reasons for you to consider outsourcing your invoicing process.
1. Reduce Business Costs
Take a minute to add up the time you or someone in your business spends printing, folding, inserting, applying postage, and mailing your customer invoices each month. You can assume your postage is a fixed cost, so it’s the variable expense of paper, envelopes and labor that goes into getting those invoices in the mail. It adds up quickly. Take advantage of a service that buys materials in bulk so that the cost savings are passed on to you.
Outsourcing your print-to-mail jobs can easily save you money.
2. Improve Productivity
Instead of struggling with printer jams, buying stamps and stuffing envelopes, you or your employees could instead be working on other projects. In place of this manual process, you could contact your customers to thank them for their business, launch a new service or product, or promote your business to increase sales.
Automating your invoice processing with the right print-to-mail company (DocuSend) will equip you with quality, optimized print materials. The time and money saved will pleasantly surprise you!
3. Gain Back Valuable Time to Focus on Growing Your Business
If you don’t have to manage the very manual process of printing and mailing bills, you can shift your focus to acquisition and retention efforts. You'll now have time to evaluate customer activity to see where you can increase sales, or you can attend to other matters that often get pushed to the wayside.
4. Monitor Your Mail Activity
When the mail service comes with a dashboard, such as DocuSend's Portal and Image Bank, you'll have instant access to six months of document history. That makes it easy to retrieve and review your customer’s invoices when they call with a billing question, or when you need to resend the invoice.
If your business sends sensitive information, and you prefer your documents not to be retrievable, we offer a HIPAA option.
5. Faster Delivery
Using a mail house means an Intelligent Mail Bar Code is added to your customer document, expediting delivery of your mail. In addition, you can see addresses that are flagged as potentially undeliverable, allowing you to check with your customer for a correct address and update your customer database.
DocuSend also offers a National Change of Address (NCOA) service, which helps small businesses maintain updated customer addresses. This service automatically compares mailing addresses to the USPS change of address database, helping you reduce returned mail so your invoices can reach customers promptly.
6. Tracking at No Extra Cost
DocuSend provides Mail Trail, a valuable feature that allows you to track the progress of your mailed documents at no additional cost. With Mail Trail, you can monitor the status of your invoices as they move through the postal system. You can see this information in your personal portal.
You can also easily send customer communications via email using our DocuLink email solution. DocuLink not only simplifies the process of sharing invoices and other documents via encrypted links instead of attachments, but it also allows you to monitor whether the email link stayed unopened, and resend the document again electronically or as USPS mail.
If you think now is the time to automate your invoice processing, do your research to find a service that is easy to use and won't charge you monthly service fees or monthly minimums.
Until the launch of the DocuSend cloud-based mailroom, there wasn't a cost-effective way to outsource this task, and although it's hard to switch modes when you're used to doing something the same way, perhaps for years, using DocuSend will make you and your business more efficient. Visit us on the web a www.docusend.biz today!
