It’s Time for Effortless Invoicing

Whether your engineers work on Planned Preventative Maintenance (PPM) or respond to reactive maintenance, you need to invoice the work with accuracy and confidence.

Most service business fall foul of the same issues when it comes to invoicing:

• Missed billing opportunities as parts aren’t charged for or engineer time isn’t fully allocated.
• Inaccurate descriptions causing invoice disputes, unhappy customers and late payments.
• High invoice volumes and low invoice values driving up administration costs.
• Batched invoices causing payment delays and cash flow issues.

If you manage a service operation these are common problems that service management software can resolve, but can it really make invoicing effortless?

Why Accurate Invoicing Actually Starts In the Field

While service management mobile software isn’t new, many companies have yet to fully grasp its potential. By leveraging service management mobile solutions, service engineers kickstart the invoicing process right after completing a job. With just a few clicks, they can seamlessly relay all job details to the back-office. Then, after a quick review the invoice can be promptly sent to the customer for payment.

Putting the effort into Integrations will save you time and money

However, to make invoicing truly effortless you need to integrate your service management software and your accounting software otherwise you can’t gain the real benefits. Without integration, your team would have to manually input invoice details into both systems, leading to unnecessary duplication of work. This tiresome process often leads to engineers delaying inputting job data and finance teams choosing to check and issue invoices in batches, extending timelines. This inevitably causes cash flow challenges, especially when customers can take 30-60 days to pay and potentially longer when you miss their payment cycle. The impact on cash flow and working capital can be substantial.

By using a service management software that integrates with all the leading accounting solutions you can remove duplicated administrative tasks and adopt fast, efficient invoicing for better financial control.

Engineers will thank you

With advanced service management software, businesses can effortlessly schedule and dispatch skilled engineers. Engineers receive all relevant job details directly on their mobile devices, enabling them to complete necessary forms on their mobile device, reducing manual errors. The software pre-populates the relevant customer / contract details, applies the approved labour rates and cost for parts, reducing engineers admin time as they check job details, input notes and complete timings before they move onto the next job. Information becomes instantly available to the administration & finance teams who can then create a fully customisable invoice in just a few clicks.

Cost Centres and Codes

The right service management software should also automatically allocate each cost to the correct nominal cost code or cost centre, categorising all job costs such as parts, labour, consumables, travel expenses and more so they transfer correctly into your accounting system. Whilst this may seem like a minor point correct cost codes as crucial for good financial management and this small feature within your service management software alone can save considerable administrative time and provide meaningful data for reporting.

Invoicing methods and how they impact servicing contracts?

Many businesses operating service contracts have to bill per visit because most service management software systems can’t do periodic or consolidated invoicing. Whereas with leading software such as Service Geeni you get the flexibility to choose between per service Real-Time Invoicing; whereby invoices are raised immediately on job completion, or Consolidated Invoicing showing line items for each visit and part used, alternatively you could offer Standardised or Periodic Invoicing where you spread service costs equally across the contract period and apply standardised monthly or periodic i.e. quarterly invoicing.  Meaning that you can either choose the best invoicing method for your business e.g. quarterly in advance invoicing, or the best method for each of your customers depending on their preference. Whether you choose one method for all or assign different methods depending on each customer contract, you can remove invoice processing bottlenecks in your finance team and plan workload efficiently.

Why now?

Invoicing can already be made relatively effortless with mobile service management software and seamless integrations. This will only evolve more with tech such as artificial intelligence and machine learning that are likely to take this to the next level, further streamlining invoice processes, enhancing accuracy, and reducing, maybe even eliminating, manual intervention. Freeing up finance teams to manage queries and maximise financial control; a must for any service enterprise.