Everyone understands the importance of drafting an invoice. But due to last-minute hustles, you may often create some mistakes while drafting your invoice that leads to delays in getting the payment. Cash flow is one of the critical aspects of everyone’s life. Who would like to make mistakes that are easily avoidable? There are free bill and receipt tracker apps available online making your invoice generation process much easier. Here are some of the common invoicing mistakes that can be easily avoided and rectified. 

Initiate Prompt Actions

Once you are given your product or service to your customer, it’s your sole responsibility to initiative prompt actions in organizing the invoices and due bills. Even if it is a week or month earlier, never delay it even by a day. The customer will create his own justifications citing your lack of promptness. Just make it simple – the sooner you send the invoice, the sooner you get the payment. Who doesn’t like to have some money a bit earlier?!

Specific Mentions

The invoice you sent should be clear and precise. It should have particulars mentioned specifically so that the client has no questions. You must not include any vague payment terms in the invoice like ‘upon receipt’, ‘Net 60’, “upon completion of the work” etc. Customers are likely to fall into various segments. These terms will be judged differently by clients. Always make sure you specify the payment date clearly so that there is no doubt.

Wrong person

Your partnerships and clientele will be more in numbers. Sometimes you might become careless and send the invoice to Person X instead of Person Y and completely fails to know it. This can lead to wastage of time and you will need to generate an invoice later to the right person later. While signing the agreement, make sure to get consensus on who is going to be the financial point of contact, so that you can avoid wastage of time.

Service breakdowns

Service breakdowns can be handy for clients when it comes to tracking and reporting their periodical expenses. You might be billing it in one go, but certain clients might ask you a detailed service breakdown. It is ideal to practice generating detailed breakdowns while generating an invoice. It not only appeals more professionalism for your business but also avoids unnecessary client mails asking for breakdowns.

Follow up

What if your client fails to make a payment on the due date? While adjusting a little bit seems fine, but if you have involved comparatively high transactions, then it’s ideal to conduct a quick follow up. Most of the times, the clients tend to forget about the invoice. In other occasions, follow-ups become important to get the delayed payment right into the pocket. You can even consider relying on an invoice management app to guide you well.

Payee Name

What if the invoice doesn’t have the all-important part – the payee name? The invoice should make sense to the client about who they are paying to and how they are supposed to pay as well. The invoice should clearly mention the name, mode of payment like bank transfer or payment gateway, etc. Today we have inbuilt payment options, e-mail payment methods, and credit card payments to consider. The rule book should be to minimize the client effort as much as you can!

If you consider invoices to be a document that invites the payment to the service you offer, then you are wrong. It is an important aspect of any business relationships. So make sure you deliver perfectly while sending the invoices. It impresses the clients, saves time, rewards you with more clients. However, make sure to deliver customizable options,  multi-currency billings, multi-language invoices, and automated solutions to impress your clients!