Less used features of the invoicing software

I am extremely experienced user of the invoicing software. Or maybe I just think too much about myself. That’s why I can make some conclusions and compare different software and features.

Some features of invoicing software are very popular and well-known, but some are used less. I guess everyone use such features like invoice sending by email and received payments registration. Then third popular feature is recurring invoices. I guess more people would use recurring invoices, but some just don’t need to send invoices to their customers monthly.

I wanted to pay attention to less used features of the invoicing programs. Do you use offers or they also use to be called estimates. What is this and why we need it? Imagine that you have a customer, who wants to order some products.  Customer asks you about the price and other conditions of the order. You send an offer to your customer, where he sees, how much he will pay and so on. Offer looks exactly like an invoice. If customer agrees to this offer, you can convert offer to invoice in invoicing software. Or use offer like invoice. When customer receive offer he understands that it is not something he has to pay for immediately. He can not agree or ask you to change something.

The other feature that is almost unused is credit invoice or credit note. I wouldn’t ever catch on the meaning of this feature unless I know a little bit of bookkeeping. Imagine you sent an invoice with wrong prices or wrong amount of the product. You can annul that invoice by sending credit note. Credit note will look the same like the invoice you have sent, but amount will be with minus sign. There is another option. If you sent an invoice for EUR 150, but the right amount was EUR 100, you can send credit note for EUR 50. As I understand it, credit note is necessary, when you don’t have option to delete invoice. My invoicing software let me delete incorrect invoice or make some corrections in it. Basically I don’t need credit notes at all.

As adequate person I understand that I will not use all features of the software. This doesn’t bother me. But I know people who get nervous about some additional features they have into invoicing software. For example, my best friend said me that if there are some unknown features in the program that he doesn’t use, it let him think that he is stupid. It sounds funny. But I understand him. So I described a little bit of unknown features of the invoicing software to make you and my friend feel confident and comfortable.

27 Jul 2012