How businesses can track payments using Miru?

Whether you’re a small business owner or a freelancer, one of the first order of running a business should be streamlining the process of sending invoices and receiving payments. Here are a few tips to help you stay organized.

The importance of tracking payments

Tracking payments directly impacts your organization’s cash flow, so it’s significant to simplify this process with a robust bookkeeping system. In order to run your business seamlessly, you need timely payments from clients. That’s how you can manage your business finances. Additionally, your business credit can be affected as a result of a diminished cash flow.

The best invoicing system will depend on several factors:

• Business model
• Type of organization
• Number of clients
• Short and long-term goals
• Tax structure

How to keep track of payments received?

It may sound simple – you send an invoice to your client and receive a payment in return.

So, why is it so hard to keep track of payments most of the time? There are times when weeks pass by but your payments are still outstanding. If you use the traditional way of sending invoices and waiting for your payment, tracking every payment manually, there can be long lags in the payment actually credited into your account. You not only have to wait for the customer to receive the invoice via email, but also wait for them to clear the dues. Not to mention, by the time you receive the amount, it's already a new accounting period.

When deciding on how to keep track of payments received, you must figure out a way to ride out this time lag. If you have an online business, you can simply receive payments through your website. For those organizations that have to resort to sending invoices, however, here are a few easy steps to simplify the process:

1. Create a uniform invoice template for invoices and verify every payment detail to prevent processing delays.
2. Ensure a follow-up system for late invoices. Don’t wait until 60 days for your invoices to be due. Leave a reminder via call or email to your clients for payment outstanding.
3. Track your financial reports. Keep track of payments received in a spreadsheet, and make a column for your profit and loss statement frequently to identify changes.
4. Provide your accounting team with a modern and scalable accounting software to automate the process. A robust software program can automatically issue invoices, track payments, send reminders to clients, and alert you to any discrepancies between payments received and invoices sent.

How to keep track of bills and payments owed?

Once you’ve already noted the accounts receivable, you’ll then need to start sending invoices and tracking the bills. Leveraging a powerful system in place ensures you don’t miss any payment, but it also helps you with budgeting through cost analysis.

1. The first step in understanding how to track payments owed is to place all your monthly payments into categories. For example, some expenses could be the fixed payment amount that your client pays you monthly or quarterly. There could be other expenses that comprise other bills such as some plugins or software that you have purchased for the task.
2. Once you have noted down all expenses, make a spreadsheet detailing all of your outgoing payments every month and organizing them as per due dates.
3. Next, get a scalable payment tracking software that allows you to track payments and also provides you with powerful reports wrt your business profits and projects.
4. Update your spreadsheet as you receive the payments.

Go digital

Are you still stuck with paper invoices? Go paperless and track your payments as seamlessly as ever. Digitize your invoices, accept payment online and access their status anytime, anywhere.

Not only that, you can also mark invoices as paid using accounting software.

What to look for in invoicing software?

An invoicing software system is crucial to every business today. However, not every software can be compatible with your business. Therefore, we have hand-picked some of the most useful features to look for in any invoicing software-

• Compatible with multiple users: Every employee should be able to add their own expenses and view and create invoices.
• Cloud-based system: You should be able to use the accounting program from any OS.
• Integration with Payment apps: Your invoicing system should be integrated with widely accepted payment apps such as Stripe, Razorpay and PayPal, and many more to ensure smooth international payments.
• Cost-effective pricing structure: Make sure that your accounting software doesn’t eat up a major part of your business budget, it should be budget-friendly and must comprise all the important features in its basic plan. There are also some free invoicing software available in the market.
• Security: If you’re recording sensitive financial information, make sure it’s end-to-end encrypted.

We can help

Miru helps you automate sending invoices, payment collection, and cuts down the work of HR and accounting teams so that they can focus on more important jobs, rather than chasing invoices. Miru is integrated with popular payment applications such as Stripe, Razorpay(under-development) and PayPal(upcoming) to facilitate business transactions - both domestic and international, as smoothly as ever.

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