Improving Your Billing Practices

Whether you are a new or existing business, you cannot run without correctly and accurately billing customers or clients. If you are not billing clients correctly, you could be losing out on thousands of dollars of revenue every month. Incorrect billing practices are not the only issue we see regularly occurring in many businesses; bills including incorrect information is also an issue. Not including information required by insurance companies causes customers to return to businesses for an amended bill to resubmit insurance claims.

Reissuing bills costs you time and materials for reprinting, as well as the effort to correct mistakes.

Does your company really need a separate department just for issuing bills when the accounts department can handle this task?  We’ll discuss the issues with incorrect bills and ways businesses can ensure accuracy in their billing process.

Problems Caused by Incorrect Billing

There are numerous issues that will be caused by incorrectly bill customers. As mentioned above, if the bills do not include the correct information, this can lead to issues for your customer. If they require the bill for insurance proof or reimbursement, it must include specific details.

Most bills that are issued by businesses will include the same standard information regarding the customer, pricing, and taxes. If customers require more details about the bill’s purpose, they may request additional information from you.

However, if your bills system is not set up to include the required standard of information, this will lead to customers repeatedly requesting adjusted bills. The time this will take can be significant, especially for small businesses, and lead to time lost that could be spent selling products or services. 

Incorrect billing, like omitting tax adjustments and only charging net amounts, can be costly for your business.  It’s challenging to recover the tax from the customer if not charged at the time of payment.

Some customers may reject extra charges for your business error and refuse to pay the added tax. Therefore, that tax will be left for your business to pay to comply with legislation. 

If you have to pay the customers’ taxes in addition to business taxes due to your own mistake, this will significantly reduce your profits. 

Alternatively, we see customers being overcharged due to billing errors; again, the customer will return to the business for an adjusted bill, costing you money to correct. However, it is then likely that this customer will not return to you for repeat business in the future. 

Repeat business and word-of-mouth recommendations, or online reviews, can be significant for any business to continue to run. Ensuring you have customers to serve and sell items to is imperative to a business continuing to operate. Losing customers over incorrect billing is a very avoidable situation for any business. 

Avoiding Incorrect Billing

There are several ways to ensure that bills are correctly being issued to your customers. Firstly, you can purchase a software program that will create your bills for your business. You can purchase software specifically for your type of business, which will retain the set-up information. 

Choosing billing software over free options eliminates the need for manually inputting business details for each bill generation. The more information you enter for each bill, the higher the chance of something being entered incorrectly. 

Billing software may seem expensive when setting up a business; Over time, it will be cost-effective if errors are reduced, leading to time and money savings.

Another option is to have an accounts department, with specially trained staff who will issue the bills for your company. Setting up an accounts department in large businesses can greatly lower billing errors.

However, an accounts department is often not a realistic option for small businesses. A small business may find it costly to pay an employee to handle bill generation. 

If having an accounts department or a full-time employee to generate bills for the business is out of your budget right now, an alternative is to contract a company to do the billing for you. There are companies that specialize in bills for certain businesses, such as Fortis medical billing for urology. 

Using the services of a specialist billing company will help you to ensure that your bills are correct without causing you the stress of trying to get them right yourself. Bills companies will often offer packages for their services, meaning you can pay for what you need without paying an employee a wage for billing. 

Using the services of a billing company will also save you the cost of billing software. You will spend significantly less time on billing as all information will go directly to the company that will generate the bills for you. 

A billing company will also ensure that the correct taxes are being charged while checking that the correct information has been included on the bills for your clients. This will protect your business profits while removing the extra work of customers requesting more information from insurance companies. 

If you want to ensure that your bills are correct, save yourself time, and protect your profits, all while giving yourself more time to do the work you enjoy, a billing company is the best option for you.

Remove the issues of bills from your life completely and focus on the products or services that you can provide your customers. A billing company will do everything you need, including chasing up with customers who have not paid, leaving you to run your business.