Four Tips for MSP Invoicing Excellence
If you think no one wants to get an invoice, think again. Believe it or not, your customers will appreciate receiving your invoices as long as they’re accurate, detailed and timely. Professional invoices are a great opportunity to reinforce the value you deliver. Your customers will respect your thoroughness and be reminded why they chose you over another MSP. Consider these four tips to achieve invoicing excellence:
1. Make it accurate–and detailed
Accurate invoicing is essential to building trust with your customers. If you get billing right, they’ll have confidence in the quality of your services. The easiest way to ensure accurate, detailed invoicing is to automate your billing process. When your technicians’ field reports and your help-desk processes are fully integrated with your billing platform, you can deliver absolute specificity and clarity for every item listed on your invoices.
If a customer has a question about a particular service item, you can easily track the charge and explain its value. In fact, by providing a high level of detail about all your services, you’ll be helping customers understand exactly what you’re doing in their IT environment–and how you benefit their business. These conversations can actually be a way of educating a customer on the range of services you offer, and provide the opportunity to potentially upsell and cross sell additional options.
2. Provide the right invoice for every customer
Customers have different billing needs, which means your invoicing approach should be flexible. You want to generate easy-to-understand invoices that are as simple or as detailed as required for your various billing models–hourly rate, retainer or fully managed services. By not giving customers a one-size-fits-all invoice, you’ll be demonstrating that you truly understand their business needs.
3. Remember, timing is everything
Prompt billing is as good for your customers as it is for you. Timely invoices give your customers certainty in tracking costs and planning expenses. Late invoices, on the other hand, can feel like unexpected expenses–and that’s a negative customer experience.
How do you get your invoices out as quickly as possible? Integrate your ticketing, help-desk and invoicing tools under a single platform or a single pane of glass and you’ll eliminate manual steps, allowing you to generate and send invoices faster and more efficiently. And the faster your customers get their invoices, the sooner you get paid.
4. Place a priority on billing
Most MSPs focus on improvements to the way they create support tickets, schedule technicians and deliver services in the cloud. And while all of that is clearly critical and essential to your business, the importance of generating professional invoices often gets lost in the shuffle. When we launched our MSP Manager service management offering, our goal was to help our partners run a more effective IT services business, and, for that to happen, we knew we had to place a high priority on invoicing. Our take is that for invoicing to be effective, it’s got to be fluid, efficient and customizable. And if it’s integrated with your service management platform, you can save time while increasing the accuracy and timeliness of your invoicing.
The bottom line is that how you handle the details in your business says a lot about your company. Invest in a system and an overall approach that generates professional, personalized invoices, and your clients will see your commitment to service from start to finish.
As channel sales manager for SolarWinds N-able, David Weeks works closely with the company’s top tier partners and major accounts worldwide to understand their needs, provide insight into current market conditions, and offer strategic sales and marketing recommendations. A regular presenter at the company’s global and regional summits, David is passionate about ensuring the success of SolarWinds N-able’s partner base. Guest blogs such as this one are published monthly and are part of MSPmentor’s annual platinum sponsorship.
