How Agencies can Benefit from Automated Invoice Management

If you manage the finances for an agency, you may notice that there is room for improvement in the invoicing and accounts receivables processes. With so many clients to juggle, each with multiple projects of different scopes, it can be a daunting task to accurately track invoices and ensure that all payments are made on time. In this article, we will explore opportunities to use software and automation to mitigate the challenges agencies face and lessen the resource strain when it comes to invoice management.

Common invoicing challenges agencies face

• Time-consuming manual tasks: When agencies require their financial teams to manually create and send out invoices, it generates excessive administrative work for the team and increases the risk of manual errors. 

• Processing a high volume of invoices: Working on large projects with numerous clients at the same time makes keeping track of payment schedules and what is owed by whom difficult, also prone to missed details and errors.

• Dealing with late payments: In order to ensure all payments are made on time, the team must set alerts, manually send reminders and regularly check all Accounts Receivable statuses to ensure clients have not forgotten to make payments. 

• Lack of integration with accounting systems: When manual tasks are not integrated with the rest of the financial systems of the agency, inputting this data into accounting software can also add hours to the to-do list of the team and leave space for a second batch of data entry errors (or worse, result in manual tasks not being tracked). 

• Communication challenges: It is easy to overlook a follow-up email for a late payment, and when clients have turnover you may lose your point of contact at a client’s business. You may not even be aware your contact has left and your emails are going into the ether. These communication roadblocks can lead to missed payments.

How automated invoice processing can help agencies

Invoice processing tools don't replace existing software like QuickBooks - they complement your current processes by upgrading the functionality in your AR tech stack. With a tool like Modern Receivable, your agency’s financial team will gain the ability to generate branded invoices and automatically send reminders to clients. You will also have access to a dashboard with a suite of financial data to better understand your cash flow, payment schedules and other valuable metrics. Automated invoice management can step in and replace many of the manual processes in accounts receivable.

• Increase efficiency and maximize resources: Removing repetitive administrative work from the to-do lists of financial team members will increase efficiency and give your team more time to work on big-picture tasks. This can yield increased innovation and allow your team to find ways to cut costs and speed up payments. 
• Simplify payment processing: By automating every step from invoice creation to payment reminders, you will ensure communication with clients is streamlined and clear, with automatic reminders and other user-friendly payment features like the ability to pay directly from the reminder email or text message. 
• Improve financial analysis and reporting: The digitization of the accounts receivable process allows you to take a deeper look at your agency’s financial status and make projections, comparisons, and forecasts for strategic planning based on cash in and cash out. 

If you want to remove the day-to-day manual tasks associated with your agency’s invoicing processes, give Modern Receivable a try. We offer a full suite of invoice management capabilities that can help your agency become more efficient and improve the overall financial health of your business.