Here are five tips for preventing billing from getting out of control:

1. Don’t let overdue invoices get away from you! The primary goal of a business is to make money, right?  Yet since many invoices don’t become due for 30 days, 45 days, or even more, it’s easy to forget about an invoice that you wrote weeks ago, and miss out on money that’s owed to you.  Make sure to set aside a list of all outstanding payments.  Don’t forget to remind customers and clients when they owe you money.  You don’t have to wait until they become overdue, either.  Sending a friendly reminder shortly before payment is expected can help avoid conflict and awkward situations.
2. Keep a record of every invoice you receive or send. This might be electronic (which means scanning in paper invoices), or on paper (which means printing electronic invoices).  The important part is that you have a single place to go to find an invoice from last week, last month, or last year.
3. Make sure every invoice and payment has a date associated with it! There’s nothing worse than starting to prepare your taxes only to discover that you don’t know which payments apply to the current tax year.
4. Make invoicing part of your routine. If you dedicate the same time every week (or month) for managing invoices, it becomes harder to forget or put off.  A common time for this is Friday afternoons, as it makes it easier to review the past week’s work.
5. Be consistent. This applies to everything from invoice templates to payment terms.  It might require a bit of extra work beforehand, but it’ll save you time in the long run.  Whether you create invoices in Word, PDF, online or on paper, create a basic theme that you can reuse every time.  If you’re able to simply fill out the line items and press send, it makes life much easier.  If possible, keep the same payment terms (e.g. Net 30) for every invoice you send as well.

As more accounting becomes electronic, it makes sense for many people to move to an online invoicing solution.  Being a small business ourselves, when we created Invotrak we made sure to keep small business users like ourselves in mind.  That means each of the above tasks needed to be fast and simple.

The idea is to make billing take up as little of your time as possible, so you can get back to the real work: building your business!