Just think for a minute what it means to handle your bills the traditional way. For one, you have to rely on cost supplies such as printing papers and stamps. The cost doesn’t stop here, unfortunately. You also have to hire someone to do the job. The person has to drop off bills and payments at regular times. What’s more, it can get more expensive if you factor in the cost of late bills and missed payments.

While cost is something to worry about when billing the traditional way, there’s also the risk of losing loyal customers. When customers receive physical invoices, it tends to remind them that they are losing money. As a result, they are likely to consider cost-saving approaches even if it means going to your competitor. This is why we recommend recurring bill software such as reliabills.com for your bill collection, invoicing, and reporting.

How it Works

Take recurring bill software as a program that manages the flow of bills and payments. In this case, payments are automated to come in effortlessly while the bills are also designed to go out the same way. It’s more of a subscription service that allows you to process future payments automatically until you decide to opt-out of the plan.

Generally, this software promises the following key advantages:

• Reduced late payments
• Reduced missed bills
• General billing cost reduction
• Better customer management and retention
• Better corporate image

Essential Features

Generally, recurring bill programs come with different features and they vary from one service provider to another. While most features are only meant to address the basic functions of a billing system, some are designed to give you a more customized and objective approach for bills management. Concerning the latter, we recommend you identify these three essential features:

Advanced Invoicing and Customization

Typically, an invoice needs to display the following information:

• Contact details
• Invoice number
• Refunds
• Total amount
• Missed payments
• Future payments

Such information can be determined in advance with running bill software. The data is very important for the accounting department as it enables the accountant to update financial information early enough for better financial forecast and auditing. This is crucial if you are looking to make accurate financial decisions and take keys steps on behalf of your partners and customers.

Your customers are also not left behind. Advanced invoicing allows them to access past invoices seamlessly. All you need to do is ensure that the emails are customized to the needs of the customers. The information should be accurately filled before the invoices are distributed. Overall, recurring bill software makes it easy to not only design your invoices and process payment but also edit the details.

Reseller Management

Do you do sales through partners (resellers) that you would want to involve in your billing system? Then you should consider this feature. Reseller Management allows your resellers to access a customer portal and view billing activities effortlessly. This means they can make follow-ups and see the identity of the customers who have received invoices and those who are planning to receive them.

Essentially, the dashboard that the resellers have access to is similar to yours. This is meant to ensure that there is absolute transparency when it comes to matters recurring bills. If the resellers want to download the monthly reports for analysis purposes, they can do it conveniently. Simply put, they can decide when to do it depending on what they want to understand.

Normally, this feature is characterized by the following functions:

• Reseller account access
• Reseller account management
• Reseller account reporting

Data Security and Privacy

Considering that sensitive data on payments will be passing through your recurring bill software, security is of utmost importance. The data needs to be protected by high standard encryption. This is important when dealing with automated recurrent bills.

Sensitive data should remain private. In this case, it should only be accessed by the people it’s designed for. Failure to prioritize on data security and privacy could expose your recurrent billing system to the risk financial losses. Since the program is meant to save you money, you shouldn’t be suffering monetary losses caused by a security breach.

Without a doubt, recurring bill software is an important upgrade for your business. It saves you both time and money and enables you to retain your customer without so much effort. So, if you are still billing the traditional manual way, it’s time you make the switch.