Automating Bookkeeping and Invoicing for Service Businesses

If you are the owner of a service-based small business, then you know that keeping track of hours and invoicing your customers can take up a lot of your time.  I’ve been helping my wife automate her therapy business, and one of the first things I noticed is that bookkeeping, time tracking, and invoicing are one of the things she spends more time on than any other non-billable activity.  If you are a service business then you want to spend your time doing things that you can bill your customers for.  If you spend time on something that you can’t bill for then you need to automate it.

For business owners who are still keeping track of their books manually this is going to be a huge timesaver for you.  Even if you are using QuickBooks, you probably still spend more time than you want tracking your employee’s time and rebilling that at a different rate.  You probably still spend time stuffing envelopes with invoices, and going to the bank to deposit checks.  Do you spend more than 3% of your time every month doing these things? You probably wish you could spend less time doing these things and more time spending time with your family or doing the work you love.  The tip this week to automate your business is to start using FreshBooks.

FreshBooks is an online time tracking and billing system that will vastly simplify your small business’ invoicing.  Because FreshBooks is an online system that is hosted by FreshBooks; you, your employees, and your customers can all access the system at one time.  You don’t have to send a QuickBooks file back and forth and worry about who has the latest version.  You don’t need your employees to send you their hours in an Excel file and then you spend time re-entering that information.  Your employees enter their timesheets directly into FreshBooks, and you set the rate that those hours are billed at to your customers.  FreshBooks handles sending out the invoices electronically and collecting payment from your customers.  With a plug-in FreshBooks will even send snail mail invoices to your customers.  FreshBooks will even send an automatic reminder to accounts which are 30 days delenquent, so that you can spend less time tracking down your clients.

A key part of the system is accepting payments online.  You probably investigated taking credit cards once but the terminal fee and transaction fees might have scared you away.  As you take your invoicing online it is critical to get past this.  Yes they take 2-3% of the transaction, but remember you’ll save much more than 2-3% of your time by not dealing with checks.  Internet payment gateways are a lot cheaper to get setup than traditional physical terminals.  There are many internet payment gateways out there and some may even allow you to keep taking checks.  Figure out how many more hours you would need to bill to cover that 2-3% service charge.  I bet you that it’s a lot less time than you spend invoicing and collecting payment. Take a few minutes this week and try out FreshBooks.  Not only will it save you time, but it will make your business more profitable.