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Regardless of the industry you operate in, invoicing must be an important part of your internal processes. This being crucial yet complex to manage gives origin to various management challenges, such as laborious and manual invoicing. Moreover, these challenges often result in unclear and inaccurate invoices, which might prove to be faulty for your business as well as customers.
To avoid such a scenario in your business, Salesforce invoicing is your go-to solution.
In this blog, we will dive deeper into its understanding and how it streamlines the invoicing process for your business.
What is Salesforce Invoicing?
It is a robust solution for businesses of all sizes and industries that works along with your Salesforce CRM to streamline the invoicing and billing process.
Being a part of Salesforce billing and Lead to Cash processes, this tool allows you to create, send, and manage invoices efficiently. With this seamless management, you can ensure the timely dispatch of invoices and receive payments at the right time.
Salesforce Invoicing Offers You:
- Standard pre-made templates, which can also be customised as per your needs.
- Paperless invoicing sharing
- Automated invoicing process
- Payment reminders
- Real-time reporting, analytics, and more.
You might now think that Salesforce Invoicing looks very similar to Salesforce Billing. But they are different!
Let’s see how.
Salesforce Billing Vs Salesforce Invoicing
Let’s understand it with an example of Salesforce billing as the cooking process, where you have to gather all the ingredients first and then prepare the dish. Here, first, you have to collect all the quote details and then start preparing the invoice. At last, you manage all the bills for the realisation of payments and revenue generation.
The invoice is the final dish through this example in Salesforce invoicing.
| Criteria | Salesforce Billing | Salesforce Invoicing |
| Focus | Entire post-sale quote process | Creating and sending invoices |
| 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, payment processing, 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 & Billing product | Often an add-on feature within Salesforce CPQ & 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. |
8 Reasons to Opt for Salesforce Invoicing
1. Automated Invoicing
With Salesforce, your entire invoicing process gets automated. From creating online invoices to sharing them with your customers, everything is streamlined. You also get the option to customise your invoicing process as per your most suitable needs.
Salesforce has all your data stored with it —customer data, 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 manual dependency which saves your money. Plus, your data is free from errors.
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
- Derive out skipped and lapsed invoices
3. Subscription Management
If you are a business that works on subscription-based or recurring payments, Salesforce invoices can help you reduce the load. It is the perfect tool that help you manage all your subscriptions and track whether you have received payments or not.
Furthermore, it can look into your customer data and analyze how many customers have renewed their subscriptions and how many have lapsed or cancelled. For the same reason, you can send payment reminders to your customers, notifying them of upcoming or lapsed payments.
4. 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 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. Contributes to offering 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.
8. 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, where all the details related to the order are present. 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, 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, making ERP your trustworthy source for general ledger and financial reporting. With automation in your hands, duplicate entries are eliminated and you can assure data accuracy.
Other Third-Party Integration Options
If you seek more advanced and additional features beyond what Salesforce offers, you can go for other third-party applications and solutions. It addresses all the limitations of Salesforce invoicing. Such as integration with a greater number of payment gateways and an enhanced transaction limit. One such application is ChargeOn.
It offers:
- 15 payment gateway integration
- Multiple payment methods are supported
- Enhanced number of transaction processing, more than what Salesforce invoicing offers
- Recurring payment management
- Enhanced batch processing limit
- Improved security and governance through tokenization and multi-factor authentication
And much more!
Here is a list of all the features and functionalities you get within different versions of ChargeOn
You can download the application from the AppExchange marketplace. Search for ‘Salesforce payments’ and there you have it!
How to Set up Your Salesforce Invoicing Process
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
- Pricebooks
- 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 up it 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.
Conclusion
There you have it all! Salesforce Invoicing is your go-to solution for all your invoicing needs. It boosts your invoicing process, reduces customer churn, and ensures timely payment receivables from your customers.
So head up and use it to boost your revenue growth!
