How would you want to send a payment receipt to someone who has paid you or get a payment receipt from someone you’ve paid for something? Would you prefer a courier that takes one or two days to reach the address or an instant method that can get you what you need right away?
You’ll prefer an instant method – an online receipt via email, SMS, or WhatsApp. What if you have to keep track of thousands of payments received or made daily? Would you still be okay with tracking them separately across email, SMS, or Whatsapp? Or would you prefer a method to track them centrally in any way? You would want to track them centrally.
Can you picture an industry where this is the every-day scenario? While there may be so many sectors or industries that may come to your mind, the manufacturing industry is a very prominent industry where there the need to manage thousands of payments almost daily. Let’s understand it in more detail to know how.
A manufacturing company receives a large volume of incoming production requests and manufacturing orders daily. That is why invoice management for different vendors spread across different far-fetched areas and with different payment cycles is complex. There are several challenges that they face while managing invoices.
If you are a manufacturing company’s owner facing challenges in your invoice management, this post can help you. This post will first discuss the various common challenges that a manufacturer faces in managing invoices. We’ll also understand how an invoice portal software can help overcome those challenges and make invoice management efficient and easy.
Invoice Management Challenges and Their Solutions
1. Generating and Maintaining Invoices to Vendors across Different Territories
In case you have multiple vendors spread across different areas of a city or country, it would be challenging to generate invoices for each of them and send them individually via courier. Even if you manage to do that, the time invoices take to reach your vendors will differ according to the distance. It won’t only lead to more time in clearing outstanding invoices but also incur more cost as you’ll have to pay for dispatch of invoices to vendors.
Solution – With invoice portal software, you can easily overcome this challenge. You can simply record all your vendors’ details, set a frequency of payments for each of them, and generate and upload invoices in the portal. By giving a secure log-in to your portal to each vendor, you can eliminate the need to send them invoices every time. They can simply log in, download the invoices, pay, and upload the proof of payment in the portal.
2. Printing Paper Invoices for Each Vendor
When you have so many vendors with different payment cycles across different regions, printing paper invoices turns tedious. For instance, if you have 500 vendors, 100 vendors pay invoices fortnightly, and 200 vendors pay monthly invoices. While the rest 200 procure big orders and prefer making payments twice a year.
Would you keep generating and printing invoices frequently as the time of invoice payment comes closer? Further, you would need a lot of printing material like ink and paper to generate paper invoices, leading to extra expenses.
Solution – Online generation of invoices from within a portal can help you overcome this challenge. Rather than typing invoices, you can generate them online for your vendors to view and make payments. You’ll also not need to keep track of individual payment cycles as every vendor can log in to the portal according to their payment cycle and pay the bill.
3. Storing and Managing Invoices for Future Reference
Sometimes you need to refer to previous invoices in case of any disputes or for a contract renewal. You may need to check their payment history, consistency, and incidents of delays in payments (if any). If you maintain records of vendors in spreadsheets or files, digging into a vendor’s past details can be time-consuming. Without proper visibility, you may make mistakes in evaluating a vendor’s performance or errors, leading to more issues.
Solution – When you segregate your vendors’ records by providing an individual log-in to your portal, it becomes easy for you to manage them. You can simply look through a vendor’s details and view their entire history. This eliminates the need for big files or spreadsheets where you may need to keep turning pages or applying filters to view a vendor’s data. This way, maintaining invoices becomes handy for you with an invoice portal.
4. Sending Invoices across Different Channels
You may be sending invoices to some vendors via courier, to others via email, and some others via fax. When you do this, compiling these invoices and collecting them all in one place can be cumbersome. Tracing any past error in invoice payment also becomes difficult.
Solution – With all the vendors’ invoices in one place in a portal, you can easily view and trace individual payments of each vendor. You can also get help tracking down any source of error or miscalculation faster and avoid it to prevent further issues due to that.
5. Delay in Invoice Approvals
Approvals of invoices offline may take more time and cause errors. Further, to fix any error in calculating any invoice amount, your vendor may have to call you or email you. In case you are not available to attend the call or view the email, it may delay the processing of payment from the vendor’s side. The more the delay in the invoice’s approval, the more the delay in the payment.
Solution – If you give secure access to every vendor, they can easily view the invoices instantly. And if they find any error or feel there is any miscalculation, they can leave comments over there in the portal. Once you check those comments, you can also check the invoice for any errors and re-upload it if everything is acceptable, along with your remarks. Once you and your vendor are on the same page, the processing of payment can start.
How CRMJetty Can Help You
Without an invoice portal, a manufacturer faces numerous challenges while generating, managing, and dispatching invoices. If you are looking for a portal solution to make your invoice management more efficient and time-friendly, our customer portal can be of great help.
Here are the features that can make your invoice management a cakewalk.
- Centralized Database – With every vendor’s details recorded centrally, it is easier to retrieve their order details and generate invoices based on their orders.
- Role-Based Access – With a manufacturing portal, you can allow your vendors and other stakeholders like your marketers or salespersons to access the information relevant to them.
- Paperless Storage – There is no need to manage everything offline when you can manage anything and everything using an online portal.
If you want, you can also request customization of your manufacturing portal, and we can do that for you. We can also help you build a portal from the ground up exclusive to your business.
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