Sick and tired of making invoices manually in Excel or Word? So you want to find a system or a tool that is going to help you create invoices online? Now is definitely the time to get out of the 90’s and move your businesses billing into the 21^st century.

Most small business owners and freelancers are used to manually making invoices. But most of us are all too aware of the downside of manual invoicing:

• Time consuming: Manual invoicing can be time consuming work and often leads to hours of repetitive changes to not so professional looking templates in Excel or Word.
• Human error: Changing information manually leaves your invoicing open to human error. Eg. Errors in your invoice or quote number sequencing can result in duplicate or skipped invoice numbers – an accounting nightmare!
•  Duplication: Having to re-enter or copy/paste line item text and product descriptions each time you fill out a quote or invoice is also an un-necessary duplication resulting in wasted time and leaving your invoices open to spelling errors and incorrect or mismatched product descriptions.
• Manual sending: Invoices generated in Excel or Word need to be manually sent to your client either via email or snail mail. Sending via email usually means saving the quote or invoice a PDF and manually attaching each quote or invoice individually to an email and manually sending it off to your client. This can result in mismatched email recipients and attachments or clients not receiving invoices as the attachment size causes emails to be sent to the clients spam box.
• Storage: Making invoices and quotations this way usually means that you store your invoice and quotation archive on one pc at your office. You therefore cannot access client billing records when you are not at that computer. If your work requires you to be mobile then this will always limit your productivity and ability to provide swift customer service with regards to billing enquiries.
•  Data security and backups: Storing all your invoices and quotations on one pc also means that that data is only as secure as the software you install to protect it. This often times leaves sensitive billing data open to the prying eyes of unauthorized users. Most small business owners do sporadically backup this data on an external storage devices, but this kind of backup needs to be done extremely frequently, else you risk losing all your data if your pc crashes or gets stolen.

What I have described above can only be categorized as problems only the small business owner of the 90’s faced, but in all honesty and quite surprisingly what I mentioned here is actually pretty familiar to a very large portion of the SME and freelancer billing market today! Shocking? Yes. True? Absolutely! Is there a better way? Most certainly!

The answer: Invoicing online

Finding a tool that’s going to help you make quotations and invoices online is easy. There are many out there and it is easy to find a quality solution that isn’t going to cost you an arm or a leg.

Benefits of online invoicing:

• Online billing saves you time. As most processes performed in online billing systems can be highly automated you don’t have to spend hours performing repetitive tasks or emply hundreds of staff members to do this for you.
• Human error is almost eliminated. As online billing systems have built in fail-safe’s that prevent duplication of data or accidental deletion of sensitive information.
• Automation is online invoicing’s answer to duplication. Almost all tasks can be automated in an online billing system. This means you create standardised templates and line items once and never have to re-enter them again. The system will do it all for you.
•  Online invoicing systems can send invoices for you via email. You can schedule a time and a date when invoices need to be sent and then sit back and watch as the system automatically sends html and PDF format invoices to clients at your command.
• A good billing system will ensure that data is stored securely online on the cloud. This means it is accessible from any web-enabled device at any time from any location. Great for a small business owner with an active lifestyle.
• Most online invoicing systems store you data securely on your behalf so you get the benefit of big business security without having to support the cost of the infrastructure yourself. Most good online invoicing systems also back up your data on your behalf. Some as often as every 15 minutes. So even if your laptop gets left on the plane or your office pc has a meltdown you will NEVER lose any billing data.

So why not step out of the time-consuming, tedious past and welcome the cloud hosted instantly automated future. Get online and search for an online billing system today!