As a professional services business owner, you’re always trying to find ways to increase revenue and make it easier to manage your growing client base. This is especially true when it comes to payments processing. The more individuals you provide services for, the greater the need to find a more efficient way to handle invoicing and billing.
By taking the right steps and upgrading your invoicing and billing, you can easily serve your clients better, provide more payment options, as well as ensure that you’re getting paid on time, every time. Essentially, you can boost your bottom line and have peace of mind.
Here are five ways you can optimize invoicing and billing for your professional services business.
1. Expand Invoicing for Clients
As a professional services business, you’re serving clients from a variety of backgrounds with different needs. They’re also going to differ when it comes to the type of payment method they prefer. Some want to use a credit card, while others would rather hand over their debit card. Some want to pay on the phone, while others would prefer to pay via text or email.
By giving clients choices when it comes to paying their invoice, you can improve your customer service and appeal to more clients. Choice is involved—not only with the type of payment you’re processing, like credit cards or checks, but also with the method for payment. Methods can include web, text, email, or over the phone.
Every client is different and going to want to pay on their own terms; if your professional services business can provide them a simple way to pay that they prefer, they’re going to be more likely to stay loyal to your business.
2. Add More Personalized Features
Want your clients to remember your business when they need services? Then you can provide them with branding on your invoices. By putting your logo, slogan, company colors, and other distinguishable features on your invoices, you are making yourself memorable to your clients and distinguishing your business from your competitors.
Branding is a powerful trust building tool. According to Oberlo, using a signature color can increase brand recognition by 80%, and consistent presentation of your branding can increase revenue by 33%. By using a payments software that allows you to leverage your unique branding on invoices, you can make a clear impact on how clients perceive your business. Not only will it be easier for them to remember you, clients will feel more comfortable paying an invoice from a brand they are more familiar with.
3. Increase Automations and More Ways to Send Payment Reminders
You’re busy running your professional services business on a day-to-day basis. Perhaps you’re seeing clients, making house calls, doing online marketing, or managing your team. You don’t have the time to get wrapped up in manual invoicing and billing processes. Additionally, you don’t want to rely on your accountant for everything because human error does occur and it could set you back.
Instead, you could use automation to send out invoices and payment reminders by text or email to ensure that your clients know it’s time to pay. You could even automate the payments themselves to come out of clients’ accounts or charge their card on a certain day. As your business continues to grow, you won’t have to worry about following up with each and every client and you can be rest assured that your funds will be there when you need it.
4. Offer More Billing Flexibility
Clients can’t always pay for your services all at once. That’s why it’s important to offer billing flexibility, which means providing payment plans and date options, where they are charged at a future date. You can attract more clients and increase customer loyalty since they know you are willing to work with them when it comes to their bills. Clients can be placed on auto billing so you don’t have to keep chasing them for payments, and they don’t have to worry about remembering to pay you every month or so.
For instance, let’s say you run a law firm and bill clients a retainer of $350 per hour. You bill the average 2.5 hours per day and work on a specific case three days a week. At the end of the month, the client will owe you $10,500. Through your payment software you auto send them the invoice by text along with a simple web payment link where they not only have the ability to pay the full amount, but save their preferred payment method to their client account and opt in to a payment plan where they get auto-charged $1,750 over 6 months.
With a flexible invoicing and billing solution for your professional service business, you can increase your chances of getting paid on time, every time without the extra effort.
5. Deliver a Consistent Experience
As you grow, it’s critical to deliver a consistent experience no matter the location and size of your professional services business. You can do that by using the same reliable invoicing platform for every location.
Even if you already have an invoicing platform, it may not be scalable and provide all the options you need at this time of expansion. Increased questions about billing, late payments, and dissatisfied customers are more common when it is hard to keep track of paid status and payment cycles. Especially for professional services businesses that are adding or already have more than one location.
Being able to have a single location with all the information needed to invoice, bill, and also reconcile client payments helps limit issues or challenges that come with using multiple different invoicing and billing platforms.
Getting Started With Stax
With Stax, client invoicing is simple. When you sign up for Stax, you gain access to billing and invoicing tools designed for your growing business. You can easily track your payments from anywhere, send customizable invoices to your clients via email or text, and schedule recurring billing, among other capabilities. Plus, you’ll find that it’s simple to seamlessly track your payments to see which ones have been completed and which ones are still pending, as well as get paid quicker. With all of these features, you’ll be able to manage your cash flow across your entire business in real-time.
For more information on Stax’s invoicing features, make sure you contact Stax today.
