Why Your Invoicing Needs to be Able to Adapt to Your Workflows

The money you’re owed won’t simply drift into your bank accounts from afar as if by magic. You need to go through the process of invoicing: creating and sending your payment demands so your customers and clients know how much to pay you and when to transfer the money. Keep in mind that no business ever wants to spend money: if you don’t provide an invoice on time and your client spots an opportunity to delay payment, they may seize the added financial flexibility.

Most businesses understand this, thankfully, and lean on templates and established processes to ensure that they provide invoices in a timely manner. But is that all that’s required? In this post, we’ll detail why a good invoicing process should be capable of adapting to shifts in your workflows.

1. Invoice presentation is important

The problem with using a static template for your invoicing needs is that presentation matters more than you might think. Your corporate brand should shift over time, and every client you deal with will have a unique set of design preferences. Where possible, you should cater your invoices accordingly — so if you roll out the exact same design every time, you’ll look stale, boring, lazy and resistant to change. Corporate agility is essential.

And when it comes to design, the vital factor is often time. Even if you pass the task to an in-house graphic designer, they won’t be able to achieve much if they’re given little more than a few hours to wholly revise the usual played-out design. An adaptable invoicing process doesn’t just wait until everything else has been figured out. It kicks into gear as soon as it’s needed, which means having the resources (including the human resources) available at all times.

2. You need room for custom details

What you should include on a given invoice will depend on a lot of factors: how closely you work with the recipient, what you’ve told them before, how you’re trying to value your services, etc. When you’re sending out a run-of-the-mill invoice for a small sum, you may not need to offer much of an explanation — but when you’re sending out a lengthy invoice for a large sum, it may speed things up significantly to include a full breakdown of the mentioned costs.

If you start using a visual-centric project management tool, you may find it useful to start adding a project roadmap to each invoice, making direct reference to the associated segment. Or if a client communicates to you that there’s a piece of information they’d like to receive on each of your invoices, you may want to impress them by doing just that. The less you rely on static fields and designs, the easier and faster it’ll be to make the useful updates.

3. Last-minute tweaks can be needed

You can issue a recurring invoice to auto-charge for recurring transactions, but what happens when your rates shift slightly in the middle of a month following a business-wide financial review? You need to be able to adjust that recurring invoice accordingly, and it needs to be clear to the client what’s happening and why. This is why systems built to handle billing must be fundamentally dynamic, allowing for major adjustments at any time.

Beyond your rates shifting, of course, you may want to alter how you charge for a given piece of work. Instead of charging a set sum for a project, you may want to charge for the time spent on it: it’s a move that can become necessary when a client starts to get excessive with edit requests and ends up eating into your profit margin. The sooner you can make that change when it’s justified by circumstances, the sooner you can correct your financial course.

4. Employees will inevitably leave

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, it’s vital to have an adaptable invoicing process because your employees will inevitably leave (even with the best possible management). The more flexible your process becomes, the less it will rely on the influence and expertise of any given employees. If you use a template designed and updated by an in-house worker, what’ll happen in the event that they give their notice? You’ll be left scrambling to figure out how they get things done so you can record that knowledge for their incoming replacement.

It’s obviously quite a difficult situation to be in. But if you use a third-party system with an accessible design and extensive modular flexibility, it won’t matter overly when someone leaves — particularly if that system offers rich training resources, as many do these days (largely through knowledge bases). You’ll be able to keep things going with minimal disruption, ensuring that your clients aren’t left frustrated by late invoices or basic mistakes.