Digital invoicing has its quirks like every other form of digital transaction. Sometimes we may send an invoice to the wrong recipient through pressing the wrong buttons on our keyboards and thus the wrong e-mail address gets entered. If we click too often without thinking through repetition, we may be making small mistakes along the way that can cost us big in the long term.
What can be quite troubling is if we make mistakes with financial data. We may enter the wrong bank number and our payee will either not be able to send us payments or in the worst case scenario, it will be sent somewhere else. More often it is the small mistakes that can cost us big financially.
Maritime-Executive has recently published an article on duplicate invoicing and the fact that when it occurs it can cause heavy losses over the long term if it keeps happening within the B2B sphere. All it takes is some carelessness or a business accountant or executive to press the payment button twice or receive a duplicate invoice and mistakenly pay for it twice.
The story focuses on duplicate invoices being approved and paid for from a 2015 study that concluded such payments happen in 0.1 percent of all invoices. Although a small percentage, this can add up for larger companies processing thousands of invoices annually in high figures.
Yes, there are mistakes that get made with electronic invoicing or eInvoicing, but they also get made with traditional paper invoicing practices. still saves companies across any industry a lot of funds and headaches. So just be wary of some of these issues, but note they are often not exclusive to the practice of eInvoicing. You simply need to be careful about the software you use and the way you fill information out on your invoices you send to clients or approve.
This is also why using a system such as InvoiceOcean's will benefit any company of any size. Our system shows exactly if an invoice was issued or not from the dashboard and is not sent automatically to a recipient's e-mail address. Users also have to mark it paid and there is a clear system in place for receiving payment.
In fact, our system is set up according to international invoicing laws (yes, we know they vary and we have variety of regions we operate in with some differences), where one cannot simply number an invoice the same number twice. One can go to settings and even set up invoice numbering from the menu to make the process seamless.
We also have various departments available that users can add, as well as individual companies if they are part of the Pro or Enterprise plans, with a separate invoicing number system if needed.
If you do make such a mistake on your invoice, such as sending it twice or with the wrong item amount or even wrong payment information, you can send an invoice correction and link it to the original invoice you've sent out. Our system also allows this.
This is why having a robust and feature-rich invoicing solution is beneficial for businesses and enterprises of any size and across any industry. Mistakes often get made and having a system such as ours that can help mitigate the hassles and quickly rectify the errors helps. A system that has great tracking capabilities, reminders or signals of invoices paid vs not paid and ways to correct invoice mistakes. That is what makes InvoiceOcean truly stand apart in the eInvoicing realm of today.
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