Your Billing Process Should Be The Fun Part!

Why is the hardest part of many jobs getting everything together at the end to bill it? You already built a relationship, out-sold your competitors, acquired the talent and materials, and oversaw the timely and quality execution of your work. Shouldn’t billing be the fun part, where we go collect the hard-earned money? It sure seems so, but too often it’s the worst part. Your billing process should be the fun part!

Great business management software can change that! How?

Company-wide software establishes paperless processes. Just try – honestly, try – to add up how many hours a week you spend on making, distributing, and collecting work orders; then hand-typing them into master spreadsheets, payroll, and invoices. (And then hand-making reporting!)  With software, jobs flow digitally from sales to operations to finance, never leaving the system, saving countless hours.

Administration can reduce billing time substantially.  Having this workflow in a paperless process avoids delays in tracking down technicians or missing paperwork.  Also,  generating the invoicing according to the set schedule is simple because BOSS sets up the billing schedule at the time the contract is signed.  Add some high-tech tools like monitors and alerts, batch processes, and 2-way syncing with outside accounting systems, and you get substantial reductions in the time to process invoices.  (Many BOSS customers report billing that once took hours now takes minutes.)

Owners love the improved cash flow.  Growing businesses often struggle with simply getting the invoicing completed due to complicated processes, incomplete systems, or prioritizing “what’s on fire”; automating the process overcomes these delays. Also, built-in reporting alerts your team if any expected jobs got skipped (saving you an upset client) or if operations logged labor and material on any jobs but forgot to get them billed (saving lost revenue).  Software that functions in real-time is particularly critical to invoicing immediately on high-margin or high-expense work, such as irrigation, chemicals, lighting, or construction.  Finally, as customers increasingly expect e-mail invoices, if not also an online payment portal, a few of your customers will respond to your streamlined processes with prompt and streamlined payment.

Operations also benefits from the help managing subcontractors. By clearly defining their jobs and requirements in that same centralized software, capturing work performed and logging it appropriately to purchase orders to be invoiced against becomes borderline effortless, making for cleaner oversight, happier subs, and simpler administrative processes.

Finance teams gain efficiency by automating accounting. (Caution! Many products on the market claim to do this but fall short.) BOSS establishes a private 2-way tunnel with your accounting system for the seamless flow of customer and property information, for invoicing and receivables, for payroll, and for purchase order and inventory management. (How much more valuable is your time in analysis and innovation than in data entry?)

When you put all that together, ultimately great software reduces management team stress.  Beyond the measurable time savings, it is difficult to quantify the value of instantly available and customizable reporting, the flexibility of working from home, or the improved morale and staff retention from putting an end to repetitive job pain points; yet, the value is very real.  Happier employees and a calmer management team will free up tremendous mental bandwidth to tackle other issues and ultimately propel your company forward.

 

Jack Garrett leads from his nearly thirty years of executive field operation success. His teams of hundreds of personnel completed projects from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada and in nearly all of the continental United States. Jack now consults with seven- to ten-figure landscape, snow, and facility services companies on improving their business systems and their management quality-of-life, including via BOSS LM Software.