Announcing Firstbase Invoices - Manage Accounts Receivable With Ease
- Creating invoices every month for the same client
- Getting paid easily by clients
- Matching payments to invoices post-payment
These are just a few of the many problems founders and finance teams face with invoice management. To get rid of these problems, Firstbase has launched a new product as part of Firstbase Accounting - Invoices.
In this article, you will learn about the above-mentioned struggles in detail and understand how Firstbase Invoices helps you make invoice management a seamless process from start to end.
Common Struggles Founders Face with Invoicing
From the outside, invoicing seems like a simple process – you send a bill and get paid. But for most founders, it quickly turns into a time-consuming chore. Managing invoices manually eats into the hours founders need to grow their businesses. Here are some things that make the invoicing process frustrating:
1. Time wasted on manual invoicing
Every invoice sent manually is time that could be spent acquiring customers, refining your product, or closing more deals. Founders often get stuck in this loop of drafting the same invoice repeatedly, inputting client details, itemizing services, and calculating totals. It’s tedious, repetitive, and far from the best use of a founder’s time.
2. Tracking invoice status
Did the client receive the invoice? Have they opened it? Have they paid yet? Founders end up chasing down payments or sifting through emails to figure out the status of their past invoices. Without a proper tracking system in place, staying on top of payments turns into a never-ending follow-up cycle.
3. Matching payments to invoices
Getting paid is an important step, but just one out of the many steps in the invoicing process. Post payment, you have to track which payments correspond to which invoices. Founders often find themselves scrolling through bank transactions, trying to reconcile payments with outstanding invoices. A single mismatch leads to confusion, missed revenue, or duplicate follow-ups that can irritate your clients.
4. Inaccuracies and errors
When you manually enter invoice details, you increase the risk of mistakes like misplaced decimal points, incorrect amounts, missing due dates, and more. A decimal point here or there can lead to delayed payments, disputes, or even lost revenue. What’s more, for founders, each error or inaccuracy in the invoicing process means revisiting the entire process and spending time to rectify bottlenecks in the flow.
5. Sending the same invoice manually monthly
For a subscription-based or recurring service, sending the same invoice every month should be seamless, right? However, many founders do the process manually. The process for them looks like this: Create, copy, paste, tweak, and send the invoice month over month. Over time, this decreases their overall productivity and increases the chances of inaccuracies and errors in invoices.
Problems with Current Invoicing Solutions On the Market
To get rid of the problems discussed above, there are invoicing solutions available on the market. But these tools also have some drawbacks.
- Invoicing doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Founders need invoices to sync with their accounting software, payment processors, and CRM. However, most solutions on the market don’t integrate well, forcing manual data entry and increasing the risk of errors.
- Many invoicing software offer basic automation, but founders still end up manually sending recurring invoices and chasing overdue payments. Without deeper automation, invoicing is still a time-consuming process.
- Most invoicing software aren’t built for speed. Founders don’t have time to navigate complex menus to get specific details about an invoice. A clunky UI slows everything down.
To get rid of such problems and more, we built Firstbase Invoices.
Introducing Firstbase Invoices - Built for Founders and Finance Teams
Firstbase Invoices is built for founders and finance teams to easily manage accounts receivable in the shortest time possible. Let's get to know the platform and its capabilities a little more.
Firstbase Invoices dashboard
You get access to Invoices under the Firstbase Accounting platform. You will first see a dashboard that shows you important invoice-related metrics like the amount overdue, average days to pay, account receivables turnover ratio, and more.
Below these metrics, you will find all the invoices you’ve created so far. The platform has a Status column that categorizes these invoices into Overdue, Draft, Open, Partially paid, Paid, and more. The beauty of our product is that you don’t have to open every invoice you want to review. The built-in dashboard will show you things like invoice number, the company for which you generated the invoice, whether it's recurring or one-time, and the amount for each invoice.
Choose from multiple billing preferences
To enable payments via Firstbase, you must provide some information and get approved.
- Select the bank account you want Firstbase to use for all your invoice payments.
- Select the default billing preferences.
Let’s talk about billing preferences in detail. Firebase offers three payout methods for you to choose from:
- Credit / Debit cards: 2.9%+ processing fee
- Direct Debit (ACH): 0.8% (max $5) processing fee
- Direct Pay: No processing fee
Once you choose your billing preference, provide us with the information needed, and get everything approved by us, you can then start paying and receiving money.
Get updates and notifications on the Invoices dashboard
Founders wear many hats and juggle a hundred things at once - fundraising, product development, hiring, growth, and so much more. Invoicing shouldn’t be another item on their to-do list. That’s why reminders and notifications are critical in any invoicing software.
Firstbase Invoices gives you notifications and reminders when:
- There’s a change in metrics related to invoicing
- We need some information from you to approve payments
- An invoice is paid or overdue
Create invoices in just a few clicks
Let’s imagine you want to raise an invoice for a company, Acme. Here’s a simple process to create and send an invoice to Acme using Firstbase Invoices.
Firstbase Invoices comes with a ready-to-use template to create invoices quickly and easily. By filling in company details like company name, address, email, etc., you can set up an invoice to send to a company.
When creating an invoice, you see a real-time preview of all the information you fill in, so you can see clearly how it will look in the end.
When you’re done creating the invoice, Firstbase allows you to share it via email, get a payment link, or download it manually and send it to your customer.
Once you send the invoice to your customer, here’s how it will look for them:
They can then choose between payment methods (card, ACH, or direct pay), fill in their card or bank account details, and pay the invoice.
How Much Will Firstbase Invoices Cost?
Invoices is a part of Firstbase Accounting, so you don’t have to pay extra to use the platform.
Regarding the costs for payment processing, as mentioned earlier, we charge a low ACH processing fee of 0.8% (max $5) and industry-standard debit and credit card fees for domestic and international card processing.
The Future of Firstbase Invoices
Right now, Firstbase Invoices users can set up monthly recurring invoices only at the beginning or end of the month. This works great for most businesses, but it’s even better if you can set up custom recurring schedules. And that’s what we aim to launch in the coming months for Firstbase Invoices.
With custom recurring schedules, you will be able to set up recurring invoices for clients quarterly, bi-weekly, or monthly.
Another cool feature we will be launching is to set custom reminders so you can automate follow-ups on overdue invoices.
We’ve built Firstbase Invoices to remove friction from invoicing. Founders and finance teams should be able to send, track, and collect payments effortlessly without wasting time on routine tasks, and that is and will be our aim with this product.