Urgh, its that time of the month again. It rolls around so quickly and every month we have to try and collate everything together and make sure we can set some time aside to go through everything and make sure we can get our invoices created and sent to our customers. It used to be my least favourite time of every month, it would take me half a day, a full day sometimes and I was constantly worried I’d missed something or forgotten about an order.
We have so many different types of orders and customers that require invoicing, some at the end of the month and some in real time per order that it used to drive me completely crazy. Whether it’s the repeat orders into an office reception, the wedding orders direct from your hotels or funeral work coming in from either the customer direct or the Funeral Director it can be a real pain keeping on top of everything.
Thankfully, Strelitzia has us covered. We have streamlined all that extra work and I can manage all my account customers in one place and create my monthly invoicing in just a few clicks and a couple of minutes. The first thing we did was input all our Account Customers into Strelitzia. (Please note that for GDPR purposes, the screenshots don’t show our actual customers!)
This meant that whenever that customer places an order, their information is already there. Once I’ve popped in the information for the order into Strelitzia, I can simply and quickly add that order to the customer’s account. It will be there waiting for me to invoice, along with any other orders they place, come invoicing time at the end of the month.
As I previously mentioned, the other type of order that we need to invoice for would be those Repeat Orders that we do weekly/monthly etc. We have several customers we do Reception Designs for and Strelitzia will automatically create those orders for me. That means I don’t even need to think about them; they’re already in the system for when we need to design & deliver them and when they are created, they are automatically placed in the customer’s account, ready to be invoiced at the end of the month.
There are two ways my customers like their invoicing, most like them monthly, but we do have a couple of customers that prefer to be invoiced for every order as they’re placed and that is something we can do very easily too. It’s no different to sending a receipt at the end of placing an order. I pop in the information as if I’m doing any other order, I place the order ‘On Account’ and then I simply click the ‘Invoice’ button and the system will create and send an invoice immediately and just for the order I have just placed.
The traditional way of creating invoices at the end of the month is just as simple too, a few clicks and all of the orders I’ve placed ‘On Account’ throughout the month will be created into invoices and sent to my customers. I can choose if I want to create all of the invoices in one go, and I can send emails to the customers I need to in one go to, it really couldn’t be simpler and has saved me so much time over the years.
I hope this has give you a little flavour of how we run our shop and how Strelitzia helps us out with this aspect of our business. It saves us so much time and keeps everything neat and tidy, that I can’t imagine having to go back to how we used to invoice our customers or that we even managed to do it all!