The Case for Automating Your Small Business Processes

In October 2008, Intuit's Billing Manager Get Paid survey took a sampling of 751 small businesses with less than 10 employees. The survey reported that the small businesses surveyed averaged $1500 in overdue customer payments every month. This puts undue pressure on maintaining cash flow.

About 42 percent of those responding said that dealing with late payments is one of their biggest pains. The only two things topping this is finding new customers and losing customers at 67 and 44 percent respectively. These same businesses said they're dealing with more late payments than they did in the previous year.

Amazingly, almost half of the small businesses said they don't have an automated system for creating and tracking invoices. The survey, no doubt, focused on providing data to encourage small businesses owners to use Intuit's product that allows the accepting of credit cards and automated invoices.

No matter, it's true that automating your invoicing and tracking process makes a difference in your daily activities. Also, the more options you can offer customers for making payments, the faster they will pay. The survey says 85 percent receive payments through checks while almost 60 percent receive cash payment.

This isn't to say that as soon as small businesses invest into automated invoice solutions, things will suddenly improve. It's still important to have a process in place surrounding the technology. PayStream Advisors reported on the best practices in invoice handling. One of those is taking advantage of reporting capabilities. This gives managers the reports of key performance indicators that tells them how long it takes to approve an invoice, the number of invoices processed in a given time and amount of discounts captured or missed. The same report recommends centralizing invoice receipt.

With many web-based and stand-alone software solutions, cost is not a factor for small businesses anymore when it comes to automating processes. The cost of invoicing customers on time and electronically tracking the payments should bring a return on investment within good time. The choices are plenty that you will have the ability to not only find the one with the right price, but also has the features your business needs.

Getting paid on time means having cash flow available for growing, paying employees and taking care of vendor bills.