With every company needing to keep a record of all sales and purchase transactions, invoicing, particularly in its paperless form, is considered an invaluable tool for business accounting. It’s beyond doubt that a well-designed invoice not only allows tracking of payments and getting paid on time but also provides legal protection for both parties, as well as enabling accurate income reporting to ensure proper taxation. Therefore, understanding the different types of invoices becomes crucial for the development of solid financial practices that contribute to streamlining the sales process.
The advertising industry is no stranger to this challenge and, to this end, pre-invoices, also known as prepayment invoices, can prove to be an effective document to ensure that both publishers and advertisers are on the same page about the agreement, including aspects such as price, placement and ad campaign duration.
What is a Pre-invoice?
A pre-invoice, like an invoice, is a binding commercial agreement. The difference is that a pre-invoice is an estimate of the amount charged for the quoted goods given to the customer before the deal is concluded, meaning that the conditions of sale can still be modified.
Benefits of Using Pre-Invoices for Publishers and Advertisers
One of the most major advantages of using pre-invoices in advertising is that, because it is not a final sale, it is not required to be reviewed if modifications are made to the agreement. This reduces time and paperwork while still providing potential customers with an overview of the unit prices, scheduled dates, and payment conditions of the booked ad campaign items without needing to pay in advance. This way, a prospective buyer can compare the offer of one vendor with another and thus choose the proposal that best fits his budget before issuing the final invoice.
However, as useful as pre-invoices may seem, generating them can be an arduous task for finance and accounting teams without an automated accounts payable system since manually aligning information from multiple Excel spreadsheets is a time-consuming and inefficient process.
Traditional invoicing methods require painstaking steps, like submitting the details of a supplier invoice, having it authorized, and finally, completing payment. Not to mention the fact that as the company grows, sending invoices by email or by hand only makes the internal process more tedious and risky in terms of errors from the basics of manual calculation, through payment dates and duplicate bills, to issuing unauthorized invoices.
Above all, it is clear that invoicing and payment work best with a central connected system to pull data from, and the common factor in overcoming the aforementioned difficulties is automation, especially when it comes to creating a large number of pre-invoices over a limited period of time.
Streamline Pre-Invoice Issuing
ADvendio’s pre-invoice wizard supports publishers and advertisers in ensuring the accuracy of pre-invoice runs by simply automating manual processes, which helps to reduce error rates and avoids the need to repeatedly review the details of each quote.
This latest update includes smart features such as history search for one-click access to all pre-invoices and its sync with Salesforce data table, which offers other practical capabilities such as dynamic uploading, resizing and data sorting, making the Pre-Invoice Wizard the perfect tool for businesses of all sizes.
Automated Pre-invoice Creation Wizard Is Now Available In Lightning Experience
ADvendio’s Pre-invoice Wizard has been updated from the Salesforce Classic view and is now available in Lightning Experience. This means the pre-invoice wizard tool will have a much smoother user interface, be much faster, and more easily accessible for all ADvendio customers.
With our latest update, we help our customers streamline many of the tedious tasks related to campaigns, channel, and client billing while also providing them with a variety of options for managing their invoice processing in the most efficient way possible for their business, regardless of their specific needs.
Originally published at https://www.advendio.com on June 22, 2021.
