Paperless Invoicing
17 Jun 2013
I saw an item on the news this morning about British Telecom planning to introduce a charge of £1.50 (roughly two dollars or euros) for the privilege of having your invoices sent out the old fashioned snail mail way. Whilst paperless invoicing is definitely the way forward, this does feel like it is somehow punishing the “switched off” world. Surely incentivising rather than punishing would be a more customer-friendly method?
Whichever way you look at this, it seems paperless is here to stay. In keeping with this there are some simple tools in good CRM solutions to enable you to incorporate digital sales documents in your operational workflow. Electronic quotes have the advantage that any changes needed are easily taken care of with a quick edit, rather than having to resend documents and wait accordingly. Similarly sales orders can be tailored on the fly, and the subsequent invoice can be generated at the click of a button – not only saving time, energy and resource but also reducing the chance of human error as this simply duplicates the information captured on the sales order. Quotes, Sales Orders and Invoices can be attached to a purpose-built email template, ensuring that your messages are sent out in a consistent manner that reflects your brand.
Having the ability to create PDF documents and also be able to send them via the web gives you the option to go paperless or serve your customers the old fashioned way – we’ll leave it up to you as to whether you choose to punish or incentivise any switch!
Before I got my start in the tech industry as part of Apple’s UK Mac launch team, I was a professional drummer (notice I didn’t say musician). But once I got in, I was hooked and I’ve been involved in the tech industry, primarily software development, for over 35 years. I founded this company and I now have the enviable title of System Architect (as well as Managing Director) here at OpenCRM.