Internet and the Single Market – European companies should not have any problem doing business anywhere in the EU crossing the border of their home country. Electronic invoicing can be of immense help for people who sell goods or services across the EU countries. But the acceptance rate of electronic billing and payment solutions has been minimal.

While probing it has been revealed that due to the differences in national standards and requirements for value-added tax (VAT) most SMEs are not able to take advantage of electronic invoicing and payment solutions. Though all the member states decided upon a common VAT standard some of the factors are still prominently different; one such issue is e-signature.

The future of electronic invoicing and payment processes seem quite promising. According to a study done by CAP Gemini, electronic invoicing systems can save around €40 billion in a year or around €238 billion in 6 years in b2b transactions all over the EU, provided the businesses fully digitise their invoicing and payment methods. There are 24 million SMEs in the EU; the public sector can also benefit out of the e-invoicing solutions.

A study was conducted among some of the SMEs who have already implemented electronic invoicing system; they reported that by using e-invoicing they saved time which was equivalent of 1% of their annual turnover. This is definitely an attractive figure; sooner the SMEs and the public sector officials realise this, the better.

The good news is: people have already started realising the benefits of e-invoicing in Europe. Sweden, Spain, Italy, Finland and Denmark, five of the EU Members States, have already implemented electronic invoicing systems for procurements in the public sector. E-invoicing has saved over €100 million in a year only in Denmark. A recent study revealed that more than 50% of the public authorities in Denmark are preparing to implement e-invoicing. More countries are about to follow the trend.

Moreover, the European Commission is considering a proposal to redefine the rules on VAT so that national VAT administrators evaluate electronic and paper invoices equally. Once this is implemented all the problems with e-invoicing and VAT would be removed and all the EU Member States can make full advantage of electronic invoicing and payment systems through the EU.

Modifying E-Invoicing so that it Suits the Bill

The economic reform agenda of the Lisbon Strategy concentrates on different factors to bring in a knowledge-based and competitive economy in the EU; the objective is to create a total business friendly economy across the EU.

E-invoicing has a lot to contribute here; it has got the potential to simplify business transactions. Companies based in the EU Member States can do business with each other in just few mouse clicks once they start using a standardised e-invoicing solution. This would definitely strengthen the Single Market environment in the EU.

The European Commission is working hard to develop the e-invoicing in order to make it more acceptable across the Member States. Once the business requirements, technical challenges and the legal issues are fixed, half the battle will be won. The EU’s Competitiveness and Innovation Programme is going to fund the experimental or pilot projects that intend to explore the various aspects of electronic procurement and electronic invoicing.

Preparing Electronic Invoicing Blueprints

To accelerate the research and development process of e-invoicing, the European Commission created a task force that has already passed its final report in November 2010. This report contains a series of strategic proposals and recommendations that can promote standardisation by eliminating the operational, trust and legal barriers.

In the year of 2008, an independent group of experts from different industrial sectors and from different companies from the Member States was launched. This was done to enhance the development of the standardisation of e-invoicing.

Once the standardised invoicing system is integrated with the Single European Payment Area, non-cash euro payment would be possible throughout the euro area. This would definitely strengthen EU’s Single Market model.

If you have any reason to send invoices, chances are that you want to spend more time in getting money than tracking it down. But invoicing is an essential part of all businesses. It seems pretty simple and easy but several organizations struggle to send invoices to their clients in a timely manner or in worst case; the invoice has inaccurate information that interrupts your client payment.

You might run across a client who is contented to send you payment as soon as he gets delivery of a finished product but most of your clients will wait for your invoice: this means no invoice, no payment. While invoicing is not a pleasurable task but it is a necessary one: by keeping your clients up to date of your expectations, you will get paid on time and strengthen your professionalism. Clients’ invoice is an undividable part of the financial side.

To make sure your invoices strengthen rather than wreck your reputation and chances of getting paid quickly, here are some of the best practices for making and sending invoices and getting paid on time:

1. Include Details of What Your Client is Paying For

Create a detailed list of what you are billing your client for. This should fulfill the contract’s terms of agreement you have with your client.

You should use exactly the same language in an invoice you used in the contract’s terms of condition. In fact, why not copy and paste from the contract? This will lessen any risk of misinterpretation and miscommunication about what you were appointed to do, and what you actually delivered.

2. Make Sure Everything is Precise and Error-Free

Double-check your invoice for typographical and computational errors. If you work with clients located in other countries, make sure you have incorporated what currency you desire to be paid in. Nothing’s worse than getting paid in the wrong currency since you were not careful with your invoice. So double- or triple-check the whole thing prior to sending it out to your client.

3. Make it Trackable

Aside from the date, you should give each invoice a tracking number. If you are creating invoices from any invoicing software, it will create invoice numbers for you automatically. For example, you can add the year as well or project or client code also. The invoice number makes it much simpler to record, track and follow-up on payments. This is particularly significant if you work with a lot of clients, or have ample of projects.

4. Make it Easy For your Client to Pay You

Specify how you want to be paid. If you are going to be paid by check, say undoubtedly what the payee’s name should be. If not, clients might craft the check payable to your personal name, for example, “when it should have been paid to your company name” etc. If you are transferring a digital invoice by email, you should add a link which your client can click on to pay you immediately.

5. Keep Marketing

Your invoice act as your marketing tool. You should include your logo, tag line, and contact information in an invoice. The look and language of your invoices should be reliable with the rest of your marketing resources. In addition, you can utilize the invoice to ask for feedback on your services. You can even add a short testimonial on each of your invoice.

6. Send it on time

Don’t be shy about sending your invoices to your clients. You should send them as soon as you complete each objective of your project. Sending invoices on time will increase your chances of getting paid on time as well. On the other hand, late invoices will definitely get you late payments.

7. Send it to the Right Person

If you are invoicing a company or any office employing more than 100 persons, you should be confident of sending your invoice to the right person with whom you have been synchronizing with right through the project.

Using these tips will help you keep a closer eye on your invoice processing system and greatly add to your bottom-line

We succeed in business in the same way that you do – by identifying those areas of business operations best left to experts. Collaboration with a large repertoire of third party products and services offers a wide array of best of the breed technology and functionality. It is this advantage to the users that prompted us to provide an extension of our online billing and invoicing service by integrating with other web-based products and services. And it is a well known fact that the use of third party products or services can greatly reduce the cost and the implementation time of various tasks.

Our latest Gadgets and add-ons that connect to Invoicera help you save time and do more for your business.

1) Basecamp – For years Basecamp has been the top choice for entrepreneurs, freelancers, small businesses and groups inside big organizations. Basecamp tackles project management from an entirely different angle: A focus on communication and collaboration. Basecamp brings people together.

With Basecamp-Invoicera integration, Invoicera users would be able to import Basecamp projects, staff members and clients into their Invoicera account. The time for these projects can be tracked using Invoicera’s time tracking capabilities to generate invoices for the projects.

2) Gmail and iGoogle Time Tracking Gadget – Our Google time tracking gadget allows you to log project work time even while you are checking mails in your Gmail account or from your iGoogle account. This would further streamline the time tracking for your projects and their respective tasks as you would no longer be required to track project work time only from your Invoicera account.

We believe these add-ons and gadget would add enormous value to your Invoicera account. And since it is just a beginning you can expect many more integrations in the days to come that will offer unparallel advantage. At the same time we would also be working to improve our current integrations for even better results.

Meanwhile, you can view the complete list of add-ons and know more about them here.

This post is of enormous significance as it announces the arrival of the very first integration done at Invoicera. And today we are pleased to announce our integration with 37signals’ Basecamp project management service. Basecamp is one of the finest web based project management tool and it is an amazing service for anyone who wants to do project management with your clients and team.

It is a real haul to enter same identical entries such as client information, project name, projects task(s), etc. in multiple web based applications. In fact the whole exercise of manually adding identical records at various business applications is redundant and superfluous. Not to mention the frustration that creeps in.

But after the integration with Basecamp it is now super-easy to import client details such as addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses directly from Basecamp to your Invoicera account for instant invoicing. Apart from importing clients you can also import your Basecamp projects and staff members.

Now you can quickly import clients, projects and staff from Basecamp and instantly create an invoice for the respective client and project. Everything right from importing details and sending invoice can be carried out using a single account and we believe invoicing your Basecamp clients couldn’t be easier.

And, therefore, integration with Basecamp creates the ultimate one-two punch: Get your job done—and get paid.

That’s about it for the moment. Since this is our first ever integration we would love to hear from all about how the integration is working for you and how advantageous it has been. From our end we can promise this is our first big step towards many such useful third party integrations. And we would be further enhancing our Basecamp integration for wider usage.

It has almost become cliché to mention the benefits rendered by web-based or online invoicing. There has been an ever increasing acceptance of online billing and invoicing as it has proved to be the best fit for most business frameworks. Not to mention the staggering amount of time, money and resources saved by implementing it.

Our future developments have a clear focus on making it simpler for businesses and professionals across the globe to make it even simpler to use online invoicing. Therefore, we are constantly on a look out for new features and adapting those elements that would work for the entire community using online billing and invoicing. Incorporating the feature to upload your signature on invoices and quotations is a step in that direction.
Option to upload your signature has been introduced as a new feature in this round of update. You would now be able to upload the image of your signature on invoices and estimates and it would display on PDF and while taking the print of invoices/quotations (in case invoices are send using snail mail). We believe this would benefit many users as this would increase the authenticity, professionalism and trust with customers. Also a signed invoice has proven to be the most effective way to guarantee integrity and authenticity of an invoice.

So next time when you send the invoice PDF to your client do not forget to sign it.

Before we jump start the topic, for those who have already started to hyperventilate noticing the speed of our updates, enhancements and new features we would like to announce on the big stage that Invoicera likes to distinguish itself from the pack of online invoicing application which are updated once in a year. Incessant upgradation and innovation are the key virtues associated with Invoicera and at no point in time we would give them up (at least not any sooner).

So we do have surprises in store for you (some real goodies) but you would have to hold on for a while to see. For the moment we would like to treat you all with the latest update that we have churned out in the form of ‘Report Summary’.  Reports form the most elementary and significant section of any online invoicing and billing application and, therefore, need to be comprehensive, self explanatory, interactive and internal to your business. Keeping this in mind we have added a new section of report summary that would show the total of each currency amount, separately giving you individual total for each of the currency used for invoicing. The screenshot displayed below should make things more apparent:

We hope this feature update is useful to you and as always your feedback are most appreciated. And until we are ready to serve you with something more deliciously cooked…Happy invoicing!

We are pretty stoked to roll out a new set of enhancements which we are hopeful that many would have already noticed. This update has opened a pathway for the next round of updates and already the development is now underway on some key new features that we would be introducing in the days to come. However this version provides a series of enhancements and minor fixes to some of the more murky sections in the application.

Apply Tax on Items

Option to apply tax for each of the item added has now been made available. While adding a new product/service or at the time of editing an existing item it would now be possible for you to apply a default tax to be shown on invoices. The list of taxes added by you would be displayed in the listing and you can select the one that needs to be applied for that particular product/service.

Set Default Color for Invoice/Estimate Templates

Per invoice/estimate template color option is already available but we have noticed that most users prefer to use a standard invoice template and color for all invoices and estimates. Keeping this requirement in mind we have now given the option to set a default color for all templates. This way you would not be required to change the template color each time you create an invoice.

Enlarged Select Boxes

The length of all drop-down menus and select boxes has been increased to make it convenient to select the items from the listings. The listings with long characters would display in a single line which will make it a lot easier to select them. This would be particularly helpful when you are required to choose from a list of say 100 items or projects or clients, etc.

VAT/TIN Number field in Multiple Language

This was the only field which could be replaced or converted in any other language. Therefore, we did have some requests from users suggesting it should be done. So there it is, VAT/TIN number field would now show up amongst other fields while customizing the template for your client and you would be able to replace or edit it with any other value that you wish to use.

So go forth, dart through the application, romanticize about little enhancements, share with us your thoughts, explore and gratify your friends with merriment.

We are very excited about the launch of our refreshingly new and improved website. We feel like the new layout is a vast improvement and hope that the content really explains what sets us apart. The folks at Invoicera have really done an outstanding job and have been a pleasure to work with. All teams right from the design team to the Internet marketing team were actively involved in the entire process of refurbishing the website, while showcasing the kind of harmony that is required to come up with the best collaborative efforts.

While we did love our previous website (considering the same dedicated effort was pumped in), and we thank our customers and supporters for loving it too. But we felt the time was right to take it to the next level. And behind website re-engineering process we wanted to give our visitors a cleaner and more modern design with updated information.

With the launch of the new website design our objective is to make sure we are constantly evolving but more importantly to significantly improve the visitors’ access to information through improved navigation, better content organization and enhanced appearance & interface. We would be certainly not permanently stuck with this design, and would continue improving upon ourselves to serve you better.

We would be very keen to how you feel about the new design. You can drop your comments here or email us on support@invoicera.com

This week we continue with our series of development updates and enhancements to carry on with our responsibility of constantly improving the application and add all of the goodies that we (and our customers) have wanted.

Easier said than done though, it takes years of customer feedback and an assiduous team to build a strong product and then continue to make it stronger. And even the smallest of change has repercussions, happy accidents, opportunities and a better product. We are lucky to be blessed with such a strong base of customers who are always so supportive and keep us flooded with feedback and suggestions.

So, here is the list of changes that we would be making live this week to make sure our users’ requirements are fulfilled.

1) Option to enter the invoice/estimate number at the time of creating the invoice/estimate would be made available. This would make sure that you are not required to go to the settings time and again to edit the invoice number

2) Client business email would no longer be mandatory for adding a new client. A new client can be added even without the business email. This has been specifically done on request and also taking into the consideration the fact that some business models do not require to send out invoices

3) Last but certainly not the least, while converting expenses to invoices, expense category name would display on the invoice. At the moment only the term ‘Expense’ is used on invoices without mentioning its respective category.

These changes are currently in the testing phase and we look to make them available within this week itself. That’s all for now, and thanks again for all your support.

Online invoicing & billing software is not only about the invoice – creating it easily and accurately, and then helping you make sure that it is actually paid. It is also about giving you an enormous amount of flexibility in creating the invoice and automating a lot of functions so you can get those bills out quickly.

With Invoicera you would now be able to create a customized invoice where you get to decide which field should be displayed on the invoice. For instance, if you are not required to show the discount column on the invoice then you can leave the field empty and this field will not show on the invoice. Similar you have the option to hide other fields such as description, quantity and tax.

If you are required to make use of customized invoice to allow you to do tons of tailoring and set up your own preference screen, then select the ‘Customized Template’ from the template dropdown. In all there are 6 business invoice templates that can be used, but to have selected fields on the invoice you need to make use of the ‘Customized Template’. All other templates cannot be used for customization.

Other Updates:

When incorporating the custom invoice capability we also took the opportunity to enhance the overall functionality by providing the following new option:

Separate Billing and Shipping Address – This has been one of the most craved features and therefore we have responded to our users’ request by providing separate billing address and shipping/delivery address. While billing address is mandatory, delivery address has been made optional. Delivery address would only get displayed on invoices if it has been entered for the client.