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Traditional invoicing (using envelopes, stamps, and mailing) is extremely time consuming and even wasteful of resources. With today’s technology it is not only easier, but makes more sense to issue invoices through the Internet. Mail can get lost, get sent to the wrong address, or be intercepted on its course. The Internet allows peace of mind and less time spent overall.
Most accounting software allows you to store a customer’s profile with their billing information. If they have been billed more than once then the blank fields on the invoice can be automatically filled using their information. The question is, not how to make an invoice, but how to make sure the customer receives it. There are a few ways you can do this.
First, and probably the least secure, you can post invoices directly to your company website. This requires a connection between your accounting database and website. This also requires a site-feature for customers to make unique usernames and passwords. This means more effort on your part with web design and if you don’t have an in-house programmer this can get costly. Not only that, but with the recent password hacks and lack of security in mega-sites such as Yahoo and LinkedIn this is my least recommended option.
The next option is using emails to send out invoices. This entails that you take emails from customers at the time of purchase, which with their permission, you could also use to send out important company news or updates. The thing to be careful with, however, is to make sure the emails are getting to the customer. People do change their email addresses, but more importantly be sure that the invoice does not go into their junkmail folder where it will be deleted and never seen. To tackle this problem you could call the customer after a set period of time if they have not paid. Also you could see which customers respond well to emailed invoices and which do not. Those who respond well can be emailed in the future with no worry and those who do not respond well can be called and emailed additional times. Since there is no cost to send an email and the information is already stored on your computer it does not matter how many times you send it.
The last approach to send invoices through the Internet is to use a consolidator. A consolidator is a company who has a website that allows a customer to access their own billing information and the billing information of their supplier. This approach is advantageous because it allows customers to pay multiple billings at once without switching between sites. If you want to use a consolidator you have to reformat the invoice information into the format required by the consolidation company. The cost of this service varies from provider to provider with some companies charging both the supplier and the customer. You can shop around to see which fits your budget best, but most are not too expensive. The main problem with this approach is that sometimes customers will have profiles on consolidation sites outside of the one you use. If this is the case then you are forced to issue invoices to multiple consolidators, creating more work than necessary.
Of course there are more approaches than these three, but these seem to be the most prevalent. One may fit your company better than another so there is no truly best option and you must be ready to make changes should these approaches not work out.
Category: news
Tags: invoices online consolidators business
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Minimize Missed Billings and Lost Profit
Sometimes, for seemingly no reason at all, a sale or a delivery goes undocumented. When this happens profits are lost and your books become a mess. Depending on the size of your business this may or may not happen with frequency, but if you’ve had it happen before then you know the major inconveniences associated with a missed billing. Here’re a few tips to help you stay on top of them.
Enter orders through a standard system. While this sounds like common sense it is not taken seriously enough. Sometimes, it feels like it makes more sense to skip this process for the sake of not only your time, but your customer’s time as well. You want to do everything to complete your customer’s order quicker and sometimes this compromises billings. Whatever the case or the reasoning may be, it is imperative to enter orders into the system as soon as possible or else they can become easily forgotten. With no record in the system, there is no notification for an unbilled order and the accounting side of your business must make up for lost inventory and less income. The same rules apply to customers who make on-site pickups. Make sure to immediately put them into the system. Make an invoice and mark it complete even if they’ve already paid you up front.
While billing problems mostly come from outside your company, there are a few things you can do in-house as well. Make sure to lock down previous pay periods so employees cannot alter their billable hours. Usually hours are changed because employees forget to enter their timesheet and wait until the last minute. This can be avoided entirely. Start reminding your staff to record their hours each week, or even better, at the end of every day. Employees forget their correct hours if they wait too long so this is not only beneficial to you, but to them as well.
Category: news
Tags: levion news
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Invoices and purchase orders require the collection of information not only from your company’s purchase and receiving departments, but from supplier invoices as well. It is because information is coming from so many different places that these seemingly simple processes can often become extremely difficult.
First, you need a system with minimal paperwork and no duplicates of existing information. Most software these days stores a database of your customers and suppliers with their unique information, but it is worth it to make sure you don’t have multiple profiles for the same sources. Within these profiles, you can store tax rates, addresses, previous purchases and much more. It is more efficient to pay based on information within these profiles (which should correlate to your purchase order) rather than with the information directly on the suppliers’ invoice. This way you can double check everything and eliminate the waiting time to correct an invoice if it happens to contain mistakes.
Beyond cleaning up any duplicates and making a clean and accurate database full of customer and supplier profiles, it is important to eliminate unnecessary approvals. What I mean is that a lot of systems require a manager or supervisor signature on unapproved invoices, no matter how small the invoice might be. Unless your company is run by you, and you only, this results in a greater waiting period since all incoming invoices must first be approved in order to be paid. Say you or your manager isn’t available to approve the invoice, what happens then? It sits in a pile with other paperwork waiting to be approved while increasing the chances it gets lost. Since purchase orders are already approved why can’t the same signature be used to pay that invoice? This is where the database of customer and supplier profiles mentioned above comes in handy. If the information is already stored then your employees can find it very quickly and eliminate the unnecessary wait that approvals take. It really all comes down to keeping your accounting software organized and allowing easy access to your employees.
Category: news
Tags: levion news
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Recently one of our customers asked us to define some accounting terms for her so we thought we’d compile a list of the most common terms we could think of. Enjoy.
Sales Order: An order that has been placed, but the shipment has not been made. Once an item has become shipped the sales order becomes an invoice.
Invoice: When the order has been shipped or completed and your accounts have been modified to show the difference. Among other things, Levion gives you the ability to customize your invoices with company logos.
Journal Entries: Almost available on Levion, a journal entry gives you the ability to automatically log your transactions or general work and tell if it is balanced or unbalanced.
Balance Sheets: These show a picture of your business at any time and include what you have (assets), who owes you (accounts receivable), how much your business owes (accounts payable), and the net worth or “bottom line” of your business (equity).
Purchase Order: A document similar to an invoice, but issued by a buyer to a seller. It indicates the quantity, price, and type of service the seller is providing to the buyer. A purchase order forms the beginning of a contract. This is usually because there is no contract in place until a purchase order is accepted and processed.
Category: news
Tags: accounting terms invoice business purchase order
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As you are probably aware, last week there was a major breach of security at sites like last.fm, eHarmony, and most shockingly, LinkedIn. Because of lax security and light encryption, more than six million passwords were broken with many published across the Internet.
What is shocking about LinkedIn’s faulty security is that they are a business that profits from data storage. Users operate under the assumption that their data and security are among a company’s highest priority. Apparently with 160 million users, this was not the case. As of right now, there are no legal penalties for this type of security breach and the LinkedIn stock actually rose in the days following the hack. Worst of all, with sites this large, customers have no choice but to remain within the site because the huge popularity and scope of services. With no legal accountability and customers remaining customers regardless of risk, there is little hope that breaches like these will be caught until it is too late. If a giant like LinkedIn can’t be held accountable, what about the smaller sites and companies where we unconsciously store data every day?
The truly disastrous effect of this type of hack is not that the actual LinkedIn profiles are now accessible, but that people often use the same password across multiple sites. Since people use their real names on LinkedIn, they can now be tracked across the internet and if their passwords are the same then there is no telling what information is now available to hackers.
LinkedIn only took the basic measures to encrypt their passwords with what is known as “hashing.” A “hashed” password is combined with an algorithm and only the hashed version is stored. While this sounds safe, hackers are able to test hundreds of thousands password combinations a second. Also, “hashing” is only the first step down the road of password encryption. If LinkedIn had only gone one step further and “salted” their passwords, minimal effort with only a few more lines of code, then the passwords would not have been cracked with such ease. If you can’t rely on companies to protect you then you have to do it yourself and here is a funny yet relevant comic on password strength. Remember, change your passwords across the sites you use and change them frequently.
Category: news
Tags: passwords software protect business Linkedin breach
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Know When To Upgrade Your Accounting Software: You don’t want to wait until you have already outgrown your current accounting software to upgrade it. As your customer base grows, so will the amount of your employees. Your employees need ease of access combined with the ability to modify or share data if you hope to keep up with your business’s growth. Inability to easily access the network will slow your business down and create disorganization. It’s better to plan for more expansion in your business than constantly play catch-up with it.
Set A Regular Date to Make Sure Everything Is In Line: By regularly keeping track of your business’s finances, you’ll also know exactly where your business stands. You’ll know where you have excess cash and where you need to put in more cash. Along with simply entering data, however, you need to make sure that data is correct. Stay on top of it and make sure your physical copies match your electronic ones. You don’t want to delay this process until there is so much data that it is virtually impossible to go through it. Without this step of organization, there are higher accountant fees in the long run.
File Paperwork Regularly: To lighten the filing load, which I’m sure nobody is opposed to, make sure you’re filing only what is absolutely necessary. When dealing with mail, if you won’t need it a year from now then get rid of it. Also, make sure you’re not creating hardcopies of things that shouldn’t be printed in the first place. If your electronic copies are organized and backed up with your accounting software then there should be no need for an extra hardcopy. You should always enter any business or money-related document into your system before filing it away to be completed at a later date. And again, as mentioned above, make sure your physical files and your electronic files match up.
Category: news
Tags: accounting software organized business tips filing
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Levion would like to announce the official launch of our integrations with Shopify and PayPal. You can now transfer your transaction data from those platforms to Levion. These changes are live for all current users. You can find them under the imports tab when you log into Levion. The integrations have been thoroughly tested. Use them with confidence.
A new download process is also part of the new release. If you have had problems installing the Levion Connector in the past, this new process should make everything much easier.
These are the first in a series of integrations that Levion plans to implement for other commonly used business systems and is just one of the ways we are making Levion your one stop solution for day to day business. We hope that the new integrations will make things easier for users of Shopify and PayPal.
Category: news
Tags: levion news
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We are putting the finishing touches on the installation process for the Levion Connector. Some of our first clients might remember some confusion during the download process. We hope that things are easier from now on.
The Connector installation is now supported by a browser based wizard which walks our customers through the installation process. This wizard should be able to provide customers with the step by step instructions they need to correctly install the Connector and begin the sync with QuickBooks.
We apologize of course to our initial users who had difficulty with the Connector installation. Our new process should be streamlined and easy to use, just like the rest of the Levion system. If you were unable to install the Connector in the past, give it another try when you have some time free.
Category: news
Tags: levion news
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Here at the Levion offices, we have been working on making Levion work whether QuickBooks is open or closed. The first part of that process has been completed. Levion will now let you enter a form and save it for later if QuickBooks is not available for the sync. The system is not where it will be at the end, but it’s a step in the right direction to deliver QuickBooks anywhere, any time.
Once this process in complete, Levion will save all your data on our server and sync with QuickBooks the next time you open the program. This will allow unprecedented flexibility for desktop QuickBooks customers.
Category: news
Tags: levion news
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The Pew Research Center released a survey today, discussing the prevalence of e-readers and the habits of their owners. The survey found that 20% of Americans read an e-book in the past year. Of particular interest was the fact that e-book readers reported to be much more avid readers then their print-reading counterparts. Device owners are also more likely to purchase a book than to borrow one.
For the full survey, Click Here
As someone who likes to read and the state of publishing being what it is, I’m pleased to see that the rise in tablet use may be encouraging people to read more. Perhaps the online book stores can do for publishing what iTunes and other online music stores did for the recording industry.
As for us, this is just further conformation of what we know. Availability of information is critical. Organizing the gathering of information and making it less difficult allows people to consume more information: that’s what we’re after at Levion.
Category: news
Tags: levion news
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Here at Levion, we know a little bit about information technology. It was of interest at our office that the BlackBerry maker, Research in Motion, was leaving the consumer smart phone and tablet market to Apple and Google. It was only a few short years ago that RIM was king and ‘crackberries’ were everywhere.
It is easy to see why the BlackBerry has fallen behind. As the world moves from information in print further towards information on the web, the actual hardware in a device becomes less and less important.
What matters instead in the new world is interface. This is the only quality that differentiates products substantially. AT&T and Verizon might be fond of advertising their data download rates or that their network is best for some technical reason, but ease of use is much more important to the end user than any of these things. Here at Levion we understand that intuitive interfaces are what’s going to get people excited about us, as well as keep them interested in using our product. We remain committed to making your accounting and task management online swift, painless, and fully featured.
Category: news
Tags: levion news
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We are finally launching the new website for Levion. There are many features we’ve added over the past two months. We’ve been working on making the sales side of our software super strong (invoices, sales orders, etc.), incorporating automation, added an integrated CRM (tasks and notes) and many more exciting features.
Right now, and for the foreseeable future, all accounts are going to be free. After the startup period (we’ll let you know when), the first user on your Levion account will be free and all additional users you need will be 9.99/month. Not only is this a great deal, but you won’t have to use separate solutions for your CRM, accounting, invoicing, etc., we’ve got it all combined into one! With Levion it’s one click and you’re in business.
Category: announcement
Tags: levion announcements tasks
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A lot of people are looking for a solution that allows them to access their QuickBooks for Windows remotely. The Levion Connector provides the user with access to their QuickBooks files wherever they happen to be. This means if you are visiting a client and need to email them a sales order or invoice, you can access Levion on your mobile device and immediately send them a PDF invoice - how convenient!
There are a lot of other features available too, all geared towards making your QuickBooks experience quicker and more intuitive. Right now, all of Levion’s features are free during the preview period. Take a look and I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.
Category: behind_the_scenes
Tags: levion connector information
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Have you ever wanted to create a new customer and invoice them on the go? What about emailing them the invoice, or recording a payment received when you are not at your office? What if you could know which employees changed documents and when? Levion solves all these problems, and many more.
Feel free to give Levion a whirl… for FREE.
After over a year of development and testing, Levion is at your service. All accounts are going to be free throughout the beta period. If you have any questions, give us a call 24/7 at 800-953-8466.
Category: announcement
Tags: levion announcement