For many years, invoices in B2B SaaS haven’t been given a heavy focus. They’re necessary for the customer, but very much not the focal point of the customer experience. And as a result, few companies spend enough time considering how they can improve their invoicing process.

It’s worth taking the time to think about how your invoicing system can improve, because a good invoicing system has a cascade of benefits across the entire revenue lifecycle — including increased customer trust, minimized revenue leakage, and more. When it comes to invoices, the things you do to improve the customer experience can also help the behind-the-scenes experience, and vice versa.

"A good invoicing system has a cascade of benefits across the entire revenue lifecycle.”

Improving invoicing requires a conscious effort, so it won’t happen by chance. Here’s what it takes to make invoicing into a process that actively contributes to your company’s success.

The foundation of customer trust is reliability, which means customers need access to up-to-date and accurate invoices at all times. RevOps also needs access to these invoices to maintain visibility into the revenue lifecycle — namely, to ensure your company isn’t enabling revenue leakage by leaving out anything that needs to be billed.

While these best practices may seem self-evident, it’s easy to fall short in practice. Finance teams will often have a hard time producing prompt and precise invoices when they need to do it manually. Unfortunately, manual effort often becomes necessary when the finance team needs to unify multiple pricing models (like usage-based and subscription pricing) into a single invoice, or apply credits to invoices. There’s also the fact that billing is often misaligned with CPQ, and the billing may not even be able to invoice what the sales team quotes.

How to Make This Possible: Make sure you look at how potential invoicing solutions unify the quote-to-revenue process. Nue handles each step of the quote-to-revenue sequence across every pricing model, so anything that is quoted can by definition be billed. Any update to a customer contract immediately results in an updated (and completely accurate) invoice. And Nue has robust functionality for credits and credit memos to ensure customers receive the cost reductions they’re entitled to.

"Make sure you look at how potential invoicing solutions unify the quote-to-revenue process.”

It’s also worth noting that Nue allows RevOps experts to preview invoices in Nue before producing the actual invoice, and share those previews with customers. This helps experts spot potentially unbilled products or services, and enables the team to coordinate with customers on payment terms, making sure everyone agrees with those terms in advance.

It’s an unfortunate truth that many B2B SaaS invoices are dense and confusing, largely because the final product needs to stitch together invoices from hybrid pricing models and multiple billing engines. Despite finance’s best efforts, the final document is often unintuitive, to say the least. And if you’re billing companies with many subsidiaries, bringing together all of their purchases into a single invoice can lead to a very complex document.

"It’s an unfortunate truth that many B2B SaaS invoices are dense and confusing.”

In order to improve invoice clarity, you need to have a single billing engine that handles every type of pricing. This way, no matter how complicated the customer bundle, you will obtain a unified invoice from the outset. Additionally, you need the ability to provide separate invoices for each department or subsidiary (either yours, or the customer’s), in order to prevent bloated invoices. 

How to Make This Possible: Choose a comprehensive revenue lifecycle platform like Nue that handles payment with a single unified billing engine, so there is no need to manually unify invoices. In order to handle complexity for large customers, look for the ability to group a given company’s line items into separate invoices based on subsidiary, currency, and more.

Your customers each have unique needs, and limited patience. And that means each customer will have their own preferences for what information is featured on an invoice. Even if the invoice is accurate and easy to understand, the customer won’t be impressed if they can’t find the information that matters most to them. Speaking of impressing customers, the aesthetics of the invoice — how personalized it is, what colors it uses, and so on — are an opportunity to go the extra mile in improving perceived professionalism. 

"The aesthetics of the invoice are an opportunity to go the extra mile in improving perceived professionalism.”

How to Make This Possible: Invoice customization features like those Nue offers can go a long way. Nue allows you to specify the contents of each invoice column, generate a custom invoice number, embed unique terms and conditions, and more. And to really drive home to the customer that their needs are unique, Nue can add the customer’s logo to the invoice, and adjust the entire document to match that logo’s color scheme.

It’s high time that more companies understand what a good invoicing system does for them and their future. Better records, a greater ability to handle hybrid pricing models, and customer satisfaction are all at stake. If you’re ready to rethink your invoicing system, learn more about Nue’s Everything Billing or request a demo here.