Batch invoicing and expenses: Why and when group invoices improve billing

As the owner of a growing business, one thing you’re sorely lacking is time. Not only are you trying to secure new revenue and clients, but you’re managing much of your business operations in areas such as:

• Payroll
• Invoicing
• Expenses
• Accounts payable

QuickBooks Online Advanced provides business owners like you with tools that save more of your most precious commodity: time. Let’s look at three tools that batch actions to help you run your business more efficiently and get more time back in your day:

• Batch invoicing
• Batch expenses
• Batch checks

Batch invoicing (previously accelerated invoicing)

Billing efficiency is essential for maintaining a healthy cash flow. Sending out invoices sooner means your business gets paid faster. Lower error rates leaves your employees with fewer headaches and more cleared accounts.

However, monthly billing can take copious amounts of precious time that could be better spent doing other, revenue-generating activities. This is why batch invoicing becomes your best strategic tool. Batch invoicing allows you to generate multiple invoices from a single-entry input, as opposed to manually entering information per individual invoice.

Examples of batch invoicing involve creating one invoice for multiple clients who are billed on a monthly basis for ongoing services. It could also work for businesses that offer a set list of goods and services. You can easily add these line items to invoices without having to re-input all the data every time.

Advantages of batch invoicing

The biggest advantage related to batch invoicing is the amount of time it saves. By working with a good invoicing software that allows you to pick and choose the information you want to include, you can quickly build an invoice with just a few clicks.

Additionally, batch invoicing helps cut down on errors, allows you to work on a set schedule for creating and sending invoices and provides clients with a templated format that is easy to read and easy to pay.

Also, by building invoices for a set list of items your accounts receivable team can review this information and gain valuable insight regarding what type of work you’re doing the most, what work is generating the most revenue and what types of work might be underperforming.

Best scenarios for batch invoicing and billing

The best way to use batch invoicing is to make your life simpler by streamlining the billing process. Think about the invoices you generate every month. How many are there where you perform some version of this process:

• Open last month’s invoice.
• Save a copy.
• Change the invoice date.
• Save and rename the new invoice.
• Send the new invoice to the client, by finding last month’s email, changing the dates and attaching the new document.

If this sounds familiar and you’re doing this for more than a handful of clients, you’re wasting time. Batch invoicing can accomplish all of the steps above with one or two clicks. If you have multiple clients who receive the same goods or services every month, every quarter, bi-annually or annually, then your business is the perfect candidate for batch invoicing.

Other scenarios made for batch invoicing:

• Clients who are billed the same or similar amounts every month.
• Clients who are similar in size and scope of service.
• Customers who work on an established billing schedule or frequency.

Streamlining your accounts receivable function can increase efficiency and close the gap between quoting a client and actually getting paid. With QuickBooks Online Advanced’s batch invoicing, you can actually create invoices 37 percent faster.*

Here’s how it works

Streamline invoice creation, editing, and uploading by grouping like invoices together and processing them all at once. These batch invoices cut down the amount of manual labor you’ll need to do in order to make corrections or updates.

This means invoices will also get out of accounts receivable and into the hands of your clients faster, increasing the odds of quicker payments and steadier cash flow.

Batch expenses

Similar to batch invoicing, batch expenses gives you time back in your day by automating a time-consuming task. Expensing typically involves gathering your receipts, credit card statements, and travel information, and entering each expense individually as they occur.

This process quickly grows tedious if you entertain clients or travel with any type of frequency. And it’s easy to put off expensing, meaning that it could take you an inordinate amount of time to complete the task once you actually set aside the time to do it.

The process of entering line item after line item for a week’s worth of client dinners or holiday gifts is important for accounting and compliance purposes, but as a business owner you have much better things to do with your time.

With batch expenses, you can create an expense once and duplicate it, while changing some of the underlying details, like vendor or amount. This removes the time-sucking task of entering expenses one at a time, giving you a more efficient workflow.

Batch checks

You know how important paying your vendors on time is, which is why you’ve stayed late at the office making sure every check got in the mail. But what if there was a way to pay all your vendors and get home in time for dinner?

Now you can batch checks by creating templates for those you write often. This makes it more efficient than ever to write checks (including all of the necessary details), without creating them one by one. Check templates give you full control over the vendor name, address and amount, while keeping other fields the same. It also helps reduce the opportunity for errors.

This new, efficient process enables you to maintain control of your company’s check writing, so you still know what’s going in and out, without sacrificing valuable time.

Use QuickBooks Online Advanced to increase efficiency and boost profitability

The challenges you face as the owner of a growing business are the reason we continually create new features like batch expenses and batch checks.

Instead of employees being tied up with expense reports, they can be freed up to do the work they were meant to do. With fewer billing errors and more on-time payments, you’ll think less about accounts receivable and more about how to serve your customers.

For more details on how QuickBooks Online Advanced can work for you, take a look at this quick video.