The internet has proved its importance to the majority of businesses. E-commerce is now one of the obvious ways to generate sales and revenue, and a wide range of companies already take advantage of it.
For any business selling online, invoicing software is one of the tools that makes the rest work: it gets invoices out accurately and on time, delivered without delay, with a reliable record of every one. That matters as much to a freelancer as to a company with a warehouse.
What often does not keep pace with the sales, though, is the administration behind them.
The mismatch
A business can take orders around the clock, from anywhere, with no human involved — and then process the resulting invoices by hand, in office hours, on one laptop.
That mismatch is where the problems appear: invoices sent days after the order, details retyped from one system into another, and a position that is only current in the week somebody last caught up.
What online invoicing fixes
It runs where the sales do. Invoicing is not tied to one desk in office hours.
It connects to the sales channel. Orders can flow in from your webshop or marketplace rather than being entered twice — see Shopify, WooCommerce and Bol.com.
It scales without headcount. Manual entry is fine at five orders a day and impossible at fifty, and the jump between those two happens faster than most businesses expect.
It keeps the books current, because the invoice is the accounting entry rather than a source for one — see journals.
It makes payment easy, with a link on the invoice rather than bank details to copy.
What being hosted adds
Four things you get from the software living online rather than on your machine.
Access from anywhere. Your accounts are reachable whenever you need them, from any device with a connection, and what you see is current rather than a copy — see mobile. It works in the customer’s direction too: an invoice with a payment link lets them settle it at whatever hour they get round to it, without waiting for your office to open.
Always up to date. There is nothing to download, install or upgrade. Improvements and fixes arrive in the product, so the version you use is the current one without you doing anything.
Lower cost. No server to buy, nothing to maintain, and no extra person needed to keep up with the invoicing as volume grows — automation absorbs that instead of headcount.
Help when you need it. A hosted product comes with someone to ask. Most questions are answered in the help desk, and you can contact us for anything it does not cover.
The part that matters most
Not any single feature — it is that the administration stops being a separate job done afterwards.
An online business that invoices manually has automated the fun half of the transaction and left the half that determines whether it gets paid. Closing that gap is what online invoicing is actually for.