According to a recent research, almost 70% of the factoring companies are still using manual systems for their invoice billing activities. It is definitely a huge surprising finding that this research has thrown up. Especially, as the IT investment is increasing at about 360% across the sectors all over the globe in the past 6 years.

Organizations are making huge IT investments in areas like networking, ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and in other advanced areas where the investment costs are quite high. However, for some unknown reason these companies are showing little interest or even no interest in implementing a billing invoice software which comes at relatively low purchasing and implementation cost but can save huge amount of effort, energy, time and even money for the business.

Billing invoice software can provide companies and its customers with all the required information and can also keep track of all related activities. If integrated properly with the general web site of the company, the billing invoice software can provide the clients of company with almost all the information regarding cash flow and allows tracking of cash flow.

This will increase the transparency of the accounting transactions and hence the accountability of the company. Customers will love this and it even increases the efficiency of the company in that department. It will also allow businesses to effectively manage their company's business plans.

Even though open source platforms are on high demand, most of the billing invoice software comes with the SQL database as it is highly tested and reliable. It is also a very fast database and hence we can provide with some quick information. Most of the billing invoice software comes as a web enabled services. Some they will have the ability to create portfolios of different types.

Most of the medium and large scale companies will have clients from different sectors and businesses. Hence it is important to deal with all types of businesses for all the billing invoice software. As they are web enabled, they must be running on all the types of browsers with out any distraction. The information that it provides should also be in a very user friendly format as the ultimate goal of such web enabled ness is to communicate with the customer in his own language. It should also be able to work with any type of internet connection even with a very slow type of connection like dial up.

Getting in to the other features of the billing invoice software, most of the better ones provide features like general ledger and double entry accounting. It should also be able to assign variable invoicing rates, scheduling all the purchases and their invoices, account debtor payments, reserve rebates and negative reserve rebates.

Report generation is another important feature of the billing invoice software. Efficient invoicing software for billing should be able to generate customized reports by basing on the requirements of the customers and of the management team. It should also be able to export those reports in to regular supported formats like HTML, excel, word and their formats. Normally most software at least the higher end software also supports the feature of periodic reminders.

Billing invoice software also provide customers with online information relating to the receivables and on the other related financial conditions of the invoices and related orders. More often than not this feature will make the process of fund transfer very smooth. And also because of the transparency in all the accounting transactions that relate to the orders, the customer relations are bound to increase quite significantly.

Another great advantage of the billing invoice software is the amount of time, energy and effort it is ultimately going to save. Energy spend on mails, phone calls, fax and physical meeting can be fully avoided using the software.

Unless and until your organization is a specialized company in making these kind of products, it I always advisable to outsource the development of billing invoice software to an external IT services company which has experience in that domain or at least in the related domains.

If you don't have enough budget to get a dedicated service provider for you, you can always buy a invoice factoring software from a vendor and then get it customized to suit all your needs. This can always be a low cost solution and will be very fast as well in implementation phase. however, you should always look at a vendor ho has a good track record in customer support and who provides with free or low cost upgraded versions for life time.