How to increase your liquidity through invoicing

Measures to ensure your project invoicing is always reliable, efficient, and punctual. Every single time. 

Cash flow is to a business what oxygen is to your body: Absolutely essential. Without liquidity in your company, you can't pay your people, your bills or yourself. Nor can you invest or grow your business.

So what measures can you take to increase liquidity and make your company more resilient? In this article, we will show you how the right tools will help you invoice both faster and earlier every month, and make sure that the quality of the invoices you send out is perfect.

Instant time record approval

Incredibly, numerous firms persist with antiquated practices for approving time records, such as printing reports or draft invoices, then distributing them to project managers for revisions. This outdated method, involving the manual re-entry of descriptions and hours into project management tools at month's end, is not only time-consuming but also prone to errors.

Review and correct time records 

With Moment by Milient, project managers can immediately review and amend time records the moment a colleague submits an entry. Should an entry be incomplete or contain inaccuracies, it's straightforward to return it to the colleague with a simple click, accompanied by feedback for necessary adjustments. The colleague will promptly receive an email with your comments, along with a direct link to their timesheet for quick corrections.

Adjust billable time separately from worked hours

Perhaps most importantly, you can adjust billable time separately from worked hours, maintaining correct project costs as well as banked hours for team members. We recommend that project managers regularly review time records weekly, ensuring alignment with contractual obligations, project progression, and client expectations, to maintain both accuracy and client satisfaction.

Electronic invoices with the click of a button

Electronic invoicing allows you to send invoices directly to your client's invoice management service (typically an accounting tool) for super easy approval. However, many companies have failed to implement this, and stick to good old-fashioned PDF invoices. This can cost both the company and their clients a fortune.

Moment supports e-invoicing through both the EHF, PEPPOL, and GLN-standard, allowing for e-invoicing in all European countries, or where these standards are supported. When it's time to bill your clients, all you have to do is send the invoices with the click of a button and wait for the payments to come in. Should you require some last-minute adjustments, like adding in a comment or descriptive text, the invoice can easily be edited before sending. You can also select if hours specification and project expense attachments should be included or not.

Payment registrations and reminders

Most banks today offer a solution to send out payment status updates that let you know which invoices have been paid. This service is often referred to as an "OCR agreement". Surprisingly, many companies choose to manually register payments by going through bank account reports. Yet another time-consuming and unnecessary operation.

Since Moment can receive OCR files directly from the bank, any payment will be registered automatically and update in the customer ledger in Moment. If an invoice is not paid within the due date, it will be marked as overdue and you can send payment reminders by e-mail directly from Moment, differentiating between 1st and 2nd-time notice. As soon as payment is registered, any corresponding project accounts are also updated and visible to project managers.

Export to your accounting system

After you're done invoicing, you might want to register the data in your accounting system. Without proper integration or file export, any bookkeeping data will have to be manually punched again, wasting precious time and energy.

Since we're aiming to eliminate all unnecessary time wasters, we integrate Moment with all bookkeeping systems our clients use - so long as their systems allow for integrations or file imports. This way, any data relevant for bookkeeping is transferred automatically. This typically includes customer and project data, invoice numbers, lines, and amounts. Moment can also import project expenses from your accounting tool, allowing you to invoice expenses to your client if needed, and maintaining correct project accounting.

Conclusion

We frequently hear stories from our clients about cutting their invoicing time in more than half after switching to Moment. This saves a tremendous amount of resources, which can be freed up for other operational tasks. An added benefit is of course increased liquidity, since you will invoice earlier, send payment reminders more frequently and have time and energy to notice hours and fees you might not have otherwise.

If you're looking for an easier way to bill your hours and increase your company's liquidity, consider booking a demo of Moment today.