Intact Insights | Blog

An Easy Way Accounting Software Can Save You Money - Intact

Written by Fiona McGuinness | 19-Mar-2014 16:15:14

Our customers, and pretty much every company in business today, are always looking for ways to save time and money. One of the easiest ways to save money is to automate simple mundane day to day manual tasks such as notifications to customers including invoices, statements, spec sheets, order acknowledgements, delivery confirmation etc.

As a common standard feature of accounting software packages, you can electronically send out customer notifications instead of posting them.  And with today’s modern day systems, your end user shouldn’t even have to worry about this; your system should automate it in the background.  All your end user has to do is simply click ‘save’ on an order and everything else is done for them.

 

Let’s take a simple example of how your accounting software can save on postage

Even today, many companies are still sending out invoices, statements and other customer notifications by post.  But as they take steps to go paperless, they’re turning to their business management/ERP systems to automate this manual task. 

So say you send out 100 invoices a week and approximately 500 statements per month.  This is what we found when we worked out the actual cost of sending both statements and invoices by post and it surprised us:

Estimated cost of sending Invoices:

Stamp €/£1.30
Paper €/£0.10
Envelope €/£0.15
Staff Time €/£0.75
Cost per invoice: €/£2.30
No. of invoices: 100
Total Cost per week: €/£230

 

Cost of sending Statements:

Stamp €/£1.30
Paper €/£0.10
Envelope €/£0.15
Staff Time €/£0.75
Cost per Statement: €/£2.30
No. of Statements: 500
Total Cost per month: €/£1150

 

So over the course of one month, this company spent almost €/£1,380 on sending out invoices and statements by post.  It doesn’t take a genius to work out that this equates to over €15,000 per year.

 

What if you could save some or all of this money?  What would you do with the money saved?

This is a quick and easy win for your business.  How effective are you at sending out customer notifications?  Are you still posting them out? What manual admin processes could you automate?

Automating the process of sending out customer notifications from invoices to delivery confirmations is something every company needs to be doing.   And when you send them directly to the correct contacts, you are not only complying with your regulatory requirements but you’ll probably speed up payment too!