Why to Email Invoices rather than Mailing Them – and 4 steps how do implement it

Invoicing your customers is an important task. You want to make sure they receive them right at or shortly after you provide your customer products or services. But are you still sending them via regular mail or are you considering emailing them?

There are pros and cons with both methods and I will go through some of the most important ones here.

Using the Postal Service

When you send invoices via regular mail you are mailing one of more pages in an envelope. You have to print, fold and pack each invoice and finally calculate the postage, add the stamp (or meter the envelope) and take it to the mailbox. All in all a cumbersome process but also a costly process. The most obvious cost is the direct cost for the postage, but there is also a cost associated with the paper, toner, envelope and the time to fold, pack, stamp and mail the invoices. Depending on your volume and how much time employees have to work on mailing the invoices, you may look at a total cost of $0.50 to $1.00 per invoice sent. So if you are sending 10 invoices per week this is not a big deal, but if you are sending 3,000 invoices each week this becomes quite an expense.

Using E-mail

When you send invoices via email, you are essentially done once you have invoiced the customer in your ERP system. There is nothing else to do. No paper, no envelope, no postage and no additional work to be done. Best of all, there is no cost associated with this method, or is there any?

So until now it sound pretty obvious that e-mailing invoices is the best, less time consuming and lest costly option, right? Well, maybe!

When you send an invoice via the Postal System it is most likely going to reach the customer in a few days. When you send an invoice via e-mail it may very well go into your customer’s spam filter. More people than you think still don’t have access to email so they would not be able to receive an invoice other than using regular mail. Some customers are old fashioned and will only pay invoices printed and mailed to them.

So, should you start emailing invoices to your customers? I think so. The cost and time savings are just too great when emailing invoices that you can’t just overlook this for your business. Just be careful to do it gradually.

The problem is that if your customers are used to getting your invoices via regular mail they most likely will not pay invoices that suddenly comes in the email. So you may experience some cash flow issues if you just start doing it, since some invoices may not be paid on time.

Here are my suggestions how to implement invoice emailing:

1. Send out an email to your customers that they can opt-in or out of getting the invoice in the mail. Add an “Email signup” form with all invoices you send out. Until you hear back from your customer that they want to receive the invoice via email, continue to mail them via regular mail. This way your customer is aware and now expects the invoice in their inbox.

2. Ask your account managers to talk to your customers about opting in to the emails since they talk to them on a regular basis.

3. Once some of your customers start getting invoices via email, make sure your A/R department follows up on them more closely to make sure they actually get the invoices and they don’t end up in spam filters. That can help your cash flow since you will now get paid on time.

4. Some of your customer may still want the invoice via regular mail. Just continue to offer that but remind them on a regular basis that you offer invoices via email also. You may also offer them an incentive or reward to receiving invoices via email.

You goal is to get as many customers to change to email, but make sure to do it gradually using the above approach. Eventually you will have almost all customers invoiced via email and you will fully be enjoying a considerable saving of time and money.