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Salesforce Invoicing is a versatile solution to handle all your invoicing needs inside Salesforce. It is a process of creating, sending, and managing invoices in your business using Salesforce capabilities.
As a part of the Salesforce Billing module, it automates and streamlines invoice creation, payment tracking, and financial reporting directly in Salesforce. With this, it eliminates the need for integrating any other third-party tool.
With this seamless management, you can ensure the timely dispatchment of invoices and receive payments at the right time, reducing delays and longer payment cycles.
Now the question arises: How does it streamline the invoicing process for your business? Well, in this blog, we will figure out the same.
Let’s get started!
Why does your Business need Salesforce Invoicing?
1. Automated Invoicing
With Salesforce, your entire invoicing process gets automated. From creating online invoices in Salesforce to sharing them with your customers, everything is streamlined. You also get the option to customize your invoicing process as per your most suitable needs.
Salesforce has all your data stored with it, be it customer data or information related to all your products and services, along with their pricing. Hence, you do not have to manually fill in the details. They are automatically imported from Salesforce into the form. This eliminates the need for performing any kind of manual effort and reduces dependency. Therefore, reducing errors and saving your money.
2. Keep Track of All Your Payments
After you share invoices with your customers, Salesforce invoicing helps you keep track of whether you have received payments against a particular invoice or not.
- You get complete control over your cash flow management
- Ensure timely payment of the receivables
- Derives skipped and lapsed invoices
3. Pre-Made Invoicing Templates
As we have already mentioned, Salesforce invoicing provides you with pre-designed invoicing templates that you can use for creating invoices.
These Salesforce Invoice templates are not rigid and can be customized according to your preferences. If you want to add a field to the form, you are allowed to do so. If you want to change the format of the same, you can easily do it.
Moreover, it allows you to design professional-looking templates that support your brand identity by including your company’s logo, information, and more.
4. Allows Customers to Make Payments Electronically
As you share an invoice with your customer through email or any other communication channel, Salesforce invoicing asks them to pay through an electronic payment method.
A payment link is shared with the customers in the follow-up email, where they can look into the invoice details and make payment. This ensures that you receive your payment for the products and services you have rendered.
5. Real-Time Reporting and Analytics
With this feature in your hands, you can dive deeper into your business data and gain a better understanding of it.
With the help of reports and dashboards, you get a diagrammatic view of all your data, which helps you look into your strengths and areas where you need to improve.
6. Contributes to offering an Improved Customer Experience
Salesforce invoicing is not only beneficial for you but also for your customers. The reminders they get help them continue their subscription without experiencing any disruption among the services they are leveraging.
7. Integrates Seamlessly With Other Systems/Salesforce Solutions
Salesforce invoicing gets connected to your other existing systems, such as Salesforce CPQ and ERP systems.
Let’s see how these move in an order frame:
Salesforce Invoicing With Salesforce CPQ
At first, the sales rep finalizes a quote and converts it into an order in Salesforce CPQ. All the details related to the order are present there. After this, the order is passed through Salesforce Billing and further sent for invoicing.
This invoice creation process:
- eliminates the need for manual data entry,
- ensures accurate invoices in Salesforce, and
- streamlines the lead-to-cash process.
Salesforce Invoicing And ERP System
This integration helps you gain a complete view of the financial health of your business. With this, you can easily transfer all your invoices, payments, and other financial data to your ERP system. Therefore, making it your trustworthy source for general ledger and financial reporting. With automation in your hands, duplicate entries are eliminated, and you can ensure data accuracy.
Official/Native Integration Options
If you seek more advanced and additional features beyond what Salesforce offers, you can go for official or native applications and solutions. These solutions address all the limitations of Salesforce invoicing. Such as integration with multiple payment gateways and an enhanced transaction limit.
One such versatile application is ChargeOn. It offers:
- 14+ payment gateway integrations, including popular options such as Stripe, PayPal, Adyen, Authorize.Net, and regional gateways. Therefore, expanding your ability to collect payments globally and meet diverse customer preferences.
- Supports multiple payment methods, such as credit/debit cards, bank transfers (ACH), wallets, UPI, or even Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) options, depending on gateway support. This flexibility increases conversion rates and reduces payment friction.
- Recurring payment management provides comprehensive subscription management and recurring billing options. It allows you to automatically bill customers at set intervals (monthly, quarterly, or annually), handle failed payments, prorations, upgrades/downgrades, and customize renewal cycles.
- Improved security and governance through tokenization (where sensitive card/payment data is replaced with a secure token) and multi-factor authentication for payment authorization, and PCI DSS-compliant processes. This substantially reduces the risk of data breaches, ensures compliance, and bolsters customer trust beyond Salesforce’s default payment security protocols.
- All this and much more!
You might have gotten this curiosity by now that Salesforce Invoicing is very similar to Salesforce Billing. But they are different!
Let’s see how.
Salesforce Billing vs. Salesforce Invoicing
Let’s think of Salesforce billing like cooking a meal. First, you gather all the ingredients, which means collecting all the quote details. After that, you start preparing the invoice in Salesforce. Finally, you manage all the bills to ensure payments are made and revenue is generated.
In this example, the invoice is the finished dish in Salesforce invoicing.
| Criteria | Salesforce Billing | Salesforce Invoicing |
|---|---|---|
| Focus | Entire post-sale quote process | Creating and sending invoices for Salesforce |
| Scope | The scope of it includes invoicing, payments, revenue recognition, and subscription billing | Limited scope towards invoice generation and management |
| Functionality | Offers all the functionalities of invoicing, revenue recognition, and subscription management | It generates invoices with product details, pricing, and taxes. |
| Automation | Automates all the tasks included in the billing lifecycle | Offers automation for invoice generation and sharing them |
| Parts of | A core component of the Salesforce CPQ and Billing product | Often an add-on feature within Salesforce CPQ and Billing |
| Benefits | Provides a comprehensive view of the revenue cycle, automates tasks, supports diverse payment models, and simplifies subscription management | Streamlines invoice creation and improves efficiency. |
How to Set Up Salesforce Invoicing for Your Business?
Step 1: Starting with Salesforce invoicing in your business, you first and foremost require a Salesforce billing license, which includes the invoicing process.
Step 2: Apart from the required licenses and packages, you need to set up your Salesforce CPQ with all the details included.
- Products
- Price books
- Bundles
- Product or pricing rules, if any, and other details.
It is important to ensure that the user or the admin setting up the tool has the required permission sets and knowledge for the same.
Step 3: At last, you must optimally set it up in your sandbox and production environment.
These are some of the prerequisites that you should practice before starting with the invoicing process. However, if you find it complex to do so, we suggest you go for an expert. Look out for a Salesforce consulting partner who can help you with migrating your data and setting up the whole process with ease.
Top Tips for Optimizing Salesforce Invoicing
Here are a few tips to optimize your Salesforce invoicing process and gather more efficient results.
1. Automate Wherever Possible
Leverage automation tools like
- flow,
- process builders,
- workflow rules, and
- AI capabilities like Agentforce AI agents
These tools are offered by Salesforce for invoice generation and sending follow-up emails. It reduces manual efforts and the chances of errors.
2. Leverage Batch Processing
Salesforce has limits on batch processing for invoices and payments. While businesses with high volumes of transactions must utilize batch processing. For the same, you need a solution that enhances the process. ChargeOn is one such solution that utilizes batch processing to manage:
- large data volumes and heavy operations,
- preventing breaches of standard limits and
- allowing the system to handle everything in manageable portions.
3. Ensure Data Accuracy
Implementing validation rules and checks on invoice data fields can prevent common errors like:
- duplicates,
- missing fields, or
- incorrect amounts that can delay payments.
4. Provide Clear Payment Instructions
Include detailed payment terms, due dates, and multiple payment options on invoices to reduce customer confusion and late payments.
Conclusion
There you have it all! Salesforce Invoicing is your go-to solution for boosting your invoicing process, reducing customer churn, and ensuring timely payment of receivables from your customers. From creation to its dispatchment and seeking follow-up on your behalf, this automated process streamlines your revenue realization process.
Salesforce Invoicing is surely a reliable solution. But to address niche requirements, such as strict gateway restrictions, spikes in transaction volume, or specialized batch workflows, many customers choose a complementary solution.
ChargeOn offers that solution. It integrates Salesforce with multiple payment gateway options, improves throughput, and simplifies complex payment operations without replacing your existing invoicing setup.
