Invoicing Guidelines: What Small Businesses Need To Follow

By: Gaurav Batra In: Business Last Updated: 2011-06-16

Invoicing or preparation of a commercial document to state the agreed payment terms is very crucial for businesses, especially small sized ones. It is a must to ensure that payments are made in a transparent, easy and timely manner. Organizing the invoicing is simple but many tend to overlook important facts that can improve it and proves valuable in the long run. Some of the guidelines include:

Itemizing the invoice Many delays in payments are caused because the invoices are not clear about the charges and obviously, the customers will not pay if they don't know what they are paying for.

Continuous Generation Of Invoices For projects extending over a period of time, it is a better idea to generate invoices at regular intervals. In this way, the customers can have an exact idea of the expected payment before work starts again for the next phase of the project.

Addressed Correctly Keep a proper record of the details of customers and suppliers so that you don't make any mistakes in retrieving the money. For this, you should have your own P.O. Box address meant for all the business activities.

Switch Over To Online Invoicing Making the transition from paper to online invoicing or going online along with the regular means is a very good idea. Not only is it more accurate but it saves a large amount of time and money. Online Invoicing also makes it easy for the customers to swiftly pay the bill with a credit card after receiving the mail from you.

Clear Terms Last but never the least; you must set clear terms that are definitive and transparent for the customers to understand. The policy behind them should be constant and sensible enough including terms like how much will be charged, whether the payment is upfront or in installments, whether there is any late fee to be paid and so on.

By following these guidelines, invoicing for small business becomes not only simpler but also eases the tension related to payment troubles. By streamlining this activity, the business can focus on other areas while saving money that is lost by negligence.