Interactive invoices set to improve relationship building

Invoices are created and presented to prompt customers to pay their dues; yet they are unglamorous, boring and serve only to satisfy accountants, says Alan Burger, Chief Executive Officer of InfoSlips. There has to be a better way, he suggests.

It is all too often forgotten that bills, in their tedious, mind-numbing and wearisome glory, are not only the domain of accountants and their clerks. They also pass through the hands of business decision-makers and other business executives who are responsible for approving payment and deciding on future business opportunities with the service provider doing the invoicing.

It is these executives that those undertaking the billing must satisfy in order to maintain customer relationships, preserve current business and elicit new deals. Unexciting and generally uninformative invoices serve no purpose other than to annoy and irritate those being billed, while suppliers miss the perfect opportunity to communicate and build customer relationships using the one vehicle customers cannot ignore.

Invoices need not be boring and static documents, raising more questions than they answer. They can be colourful and as informative as the biller and billed require.

Traditional, first-generation e-billing, presentment and payment (EBPP) service suppliers set invoicing on a new level when they began to concentrate on saving costs through automation and the removal of paper from the process.

However, in doing this, they merely created an electronic version of the hard-copy invoice. Instead of receiving their dull invoices in the post, organisations now received these very same documents electronically.

While these e-billing service providers certainly saved some money with this move, they failed to leverage the medium by going beyond basic e-billing to deliver rich and interactive documents that could be used to enhance relationship-building.

Next-generation e-billing providers have created invoices that are user-friendly, can answer queries, and reconfigure themselves on demand to meet customer needs. In so doing, they have become one of the best ways to reach and communicate with customers.

These next-generation electronic invoices and statements fulfil all the traditional and first-generation e-billing services, but they move beyond that to provide documents that truly engage with the customer.

These bills become brand builders, enabling the invoicing company to market itself while providing the information required by the paying company. They also allow the billing company to customise these documents to meet the differing needs and personalities of their customers.

Delivered to each recipient via e-mail as small, secure and standalone packets, these interactive e-bills enable customers to drill down on any item on the invoice or statement instantly and query items by simply clicking on them. The way the bill is displayed can also be reconfigured to suit the person viewing it, including access to functionalities such as searching, filtering and sorting items on each bill. Other interactive information such as educational and marketing material can also be incorporated.

For example: a company that sends monthly invoices for vehicle use would use interactive invoices to present recipients with bills that they can easily summarise, use to break information down into distinct cost centres, or from which they can view a detailed vehicle history, from rental charges to repairs, service histories, fuel consumption, distance travelled, driver details and insurance information.

With interactive invoicing, billing has moved out of the realm of most hated documents and has become a truly useful instrument that aids both the debtor and the creditor.