Whether you are a new or existing business, you cannot run without correctly and accurately billing customers or clients. If you are not billing clients correctly, you could be losing out on thousands of dollars of revenue every month.
Incorrect billing is not the only issue we see regularly occurring in many businesses; bills including incorrect information is also an issue. Not including information required by insurance companies causes customers to return to businesses for an amended bill to resubmit insurance claims.
If your business needs to spend time reissuing bills, this is at a cost to you in both materials to reprint the bill and, more importantly, in the time you will spend correcting your mistake.
Some companies will have an accounts department that will issue all bills, but is there a need to have an entire department to do this for you? We will explore some of the issues that incorrect billing can cause and options that a business has to help ensure that the bills they issue are correct.
Problems Caused by Incorrect Billing
There are numerous issues that will be caused by incorrectly billing customers. As mentioned above, if the bills do not include the correct information, this can lead to issues for your customer. If they need the bill for proof for insurance purposes or to reclaim from a third party, the bill will very likely need to include specific information.
Most bills that are issued by businesses will include the same standard information regarding the customer, pricing, and taxes. If the customer knows they need specific details on what they will be doing with the bill, they may ask you to add in more information.
However, if your billing system is not set up to include the required standard of information, this will lead to customers repeatedly requesting adjusted bills. The time this will take can be significant, especially for small businesses, and lead to time lost that could be spent selling products or services.
If your business is not billing the clients correctly, for example, missing the tax adjustment and only charging the customer the net amount for products or services, this will cost you. If you do not charge the customer the tax, it can be very difficult to recover this after the bill has been paid.
Many customers will not accept additional charges due to your business making a mistake and will refuse to pay the additional tax. Therefore, that tax will be left for your business to pay to comply with legislation.
If you have to pay the customers’ taxes in addition to business taxes due to your own mistake, this will significantly reduce your profits.
Alternatively, we see customers being overcharged due to billing errors; again, the customer will return to the business for an adjusted bill, costing you money to correct. However, it is then likely that this customer will not return to you for repeat business in the future.
Repeat business and word-of-mouth recommendations, or online reviews, can be significant for any business to continue to run. Ensuring you have customers to serve and sell items to is imperative to a business continuing to operate. Losing customers over incorrect billing is a very avoidable situation for any business.
Avoiding Incorrect Billing
There are several ways to ensure that bills are correctly being issued to your customers. Firstly, you can purchase a software program that will create your bills for your business. You can purchase software specifically for your type of business, which will retain the set-up information.
Purchasing billing software is a better option than free billing software, where you must manually enter your business information each time you generate a bill. The more information you enter for each bill, the higher the chance of something being entered incorrectly.
Billing software may seem expensive when setting up a business; however, over time, it will more than pay for itself if you do not need to spend time correcting errors or undercharging.
Another option is to have an accounts department, with specially trained staff who will issue the bills for your company. An accounts department will be standard for large businesses and will significantly reduce the chance of errors being made in billing.
However, an accounts department is often not a realistic option for small businesses. Paying the wages for someone to generate the bills for the company can be more than a small business can afford to do.
If having an accounts department or a full-time employee to generate bills for the business is out of your budget right now, an alternative is to contract a company to do the billing for you. There are companies that specialize in bills for certain businesses, such as Fortis medical billing for urology.
Using the services of a specialist billing company will help you to ensure that your bills are correct without causing you the stress of trying to get them right yourself. Billing companies will often offer packages for their services, meaning you can pay for what you need without paying an employee a wage for billing.
Using the services of a billing company will also save you the cost of billing software. You will spend significantly less time on billing as all information will go directly to the company that will generate the bills for you.
A billing company will also ensure that the correct taxes are being charged while checking that the correct information has been included on the bills for your clients. This will protect your business profits while removing the extra work of customers requesting more information for insurance companies.
So, if you want to ensure that your bills are correct, save yourself time, and protect your profits, all while giving yourself more time to do the work you enjoy, a billing company is the best option for you.
Remove the issues of billing from your life completely and focus on the products or services that you can provide your customers. A billing company will do everything you need, including chasing up with customers who have not paid, leaving you to run your business.
Source: Cosmo Politian