There are a lot of reasons why combining your invoicing and payment system with your CRM solution can save you time, money, and many headaches. Here are the top 5 reasons, as Salesforce provides a ton of features to make invoicing more manageable and accessible.
REASON NUMBER 1: Invoice Automation
One of the most significant benefits of creating online invoices with Salesforce is that you can automate the entire process.
Salesforce enables you to create automated triggers, which will automatically deliver email invoices to your customer. Your organization can customize process flows to whatever process best suits your needs.
When you combine the power of CRM technology with invoice automation, you will get paid faster.
After all, Salesforce already has your customer data, information on products and pricing for orders. This means that fields can be pre-filled for your invoices – and there won’t be any manual input. This clearly lowers the amount of labor going into each invoice, which saves you money!
REASON NUMBER 2: Minimize Errors
If you are still doing snail mail invoicing for your Accounts Receivable process, then you know that it takes a lot of time to print and send invoices.
When you do receive payment, your team still has to manually enter transactions into Salesforce. They may also be reentering data from payment systems that aren’t connected to your order management system. All of this requires a human to enter data.
At any point where someone’s doing something by hand, you run the risk of human error, which may be hard to track down and resolve and we all know this has a high cost of labor.
Studies show that 3.6% of all invoices contain errors, and companies processing more than 350,000 invoices a year reported that “invoice exceptions” were responsible for creating 36% of all supplier-related phone calls.
On the flip side, when you invoice your customers digitally through Salesforce, there is lower risk for human error. If a mistake is made, Salesforce allows you to fix it quickly and reissue an updated invoice to your customer immediately. Working in Salesforce with well integrated systems dramatically reduces invoicing errors.
REASON NUMBER 3: Get Paid Faster
Pure and simple, when you use online invoicing software to automate, you will get paid faster.
When you combine Chargent with a Salesforce Invoicing system like Salesforce Billing, you get a lot of extra features that cut out many unnecessary steps in the payment process, including:
- A payment request created by the system as soon as a defined trigger condition is met. No more waiting for that regular invoice batch to process. Instead, invoices are sent right at the moment the customer owes you.
- Using Salesforce to email invoices. You won’t have any more delay in invoice delivery.
- After completing a payment, Salesforce immediately and automatically records the customer and transaction details. Employees no longer have to register these payments manually, and your business eliminates delays from processing and reconciling payments.
REASON NUMBER 4: Reduced Costs
Every business wants to get more customers, however the more customers you serve, the more invoices you’ll need to send.
IF you are still sending paper invoices, you have to deal with fixed costs for each invoice you send out. Studies show that each paper invoice costs an organization an average of $7.99. Online invoicing can cut those costs dramatically, on average, down to $3.13 per invoice.
There’s money to be saved in processing, too. Businesses pay up to $3.00 to process each paper check. Processing a bank transfer payment typically costs less than $1.00 per transaction.
REASON NUMBER 5: Better Customer Service
When you use Salesforce for invoicing, you are also saving your customers time, and hassle.
When you add a “Pay Now” button to your Salesforce invoice, your customers can quickly pay with a card or bank account. They won’t have to take time to write a check, then find a stamp, and finally drop it in the mail. Does anyone really want to be doing this?
Most importantly, payment and invoicing details are available right in Salesforce. When your customers do reach out, any teammate can help them quickly! Your team can view, or even resend, invoices at the touch of a button.
Chargent Can Help!
In short, you can save time and money by combining your invoicing system with Salesforce and CRM payment solutions like Chargent. Try our free 30-day trial to see how Chargent can simplify your invoicing process for you and your customers!