Mastering Facility Maintenance Billing with Consolidated Invoicing
December 2, 2024 | Read: 7 minutes
Billing for multi-property services can be a struggle for many facility maintenance businesses. Whether you handle installations, maintenance, or emergency repairs, your team needs the proper tools to juggle varying responsibilities. Revamping your billing process by including consolidated invoicing is crucial for managing complex B2B2C relationships.
Today we’ll cover what consolidated invoicing software is, and how the best software improves financial management for both your team and customers.
What is Consolidated Invoicing?
Consolidated invoicing is the process of merging multiple bills into one. This has various benefits, from reducing the number of bills sent to customers and encouraging timely payments. Perfect for businesses that maintain commercial facilities, consolidated bills streamline finance management and reduce admin, which improves cash flow.
For facility maintenance, this process makes it possible to combine various services carried out over a set period, such as HVAC system inspections, fire-alarm testing, and landscaping, into a single invoice.
When it’s time to bill your customers, Commusoft’s invoicing software, for example, improves the accuracy of administrative processes by making it easy to select specific invoices to combine, based on your customers’ preferences and billing cycles.
The Importance of Consolidated Invoicing
Consolidated billing is an essential tool for facility maintenance businesses navigating a large variety of clients, work locations, and service types.
For example, your facility maintenance business serves a commercial client with service locations in multiple states. Your crews provide numerous service types, including installations, planned maintenance, and emergency servicing, across various trades, such as HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and more.
Depending on the number of service locations per customer, plus the number of visits, you can potentially end up with hundreds of invoices per month. Sending invoices one by one is an inefficient process for admins. Plus, bombarding your customers with hundreds of bills is overwhelming and can increase the likelihood of payments being delayed, or overlooked entirely.
This is where consolidated invoices come in. Merging multiple charges across different services and properties into a single, comprehensive invoice simplifies the payment process.
Consolidated invoices contain details for each service included, such as work address, service type, and job number. This ensures customers always have clarity over what they’ve been billed for, and then can pay the combined amount all at once. You can enhance cash flow and strengthen client relationships by making payments incredibly easy for them.
Additionally, invoicing software can help your team centralize bills, and make it easy to establish repeatable billing and payment collection processes.
The benefits of consolidated invoicing are clear:
- Streamlined Operations: Businesses can reduce administrative workload and minimize errors. With reduced paperwork, lower transaction fees, and decreased disputes, your team can focus more on delivering exceptional service quality.
- Improved Cash Flow: Gain clearer overviews of all transactions and enable faster payments thanks to the convenience of a single invoice. Giving your clients transparent invoices will help them track their own finances, reducing payment errors and confusion.
- Enhanced Client Relationships: Boost professionalism and build trust by providing clients with a simplified billing process. Because consolidated invoices are usually of substantial monetary value, they reduce the likelihood of a customer missing a payment. Plus, following a consistent billing and payment collection period will make it easier to maintain long-lasting business relationships.
In short, condensing bills and payments make it easier to match customer needs based on how they want to be billed. After all, maintaining customer trust and satisfaction is vital. Plus, consolidated invoicing is integral to communication and accountability by providing a transparent view of all services rendered within your set timeframe.
Features to Look for in Consolidated Invoicing Software
There are many software providers to choose from. As you evaluate your options, here are four can’t-miss features to look out for.
Multi-Site and Service Billing
Customization and flexibility should be the keystone of the product. You should have the ability to properly meet your customer needs. Admins should have the option to control:
- whether you want to consolidate based on service types
- whether to combine bills based on work locations
- how often to bill the customer
For example, Customer A owns three commercial work locations. They want a consolidated invoice for each property, combining the charges for appointments carried out that month.
Customer B also owns three commercial work locations. They also want consolidated invoices, not organized by work site but by service type. They want to be billed bi-monthly.
Great consolidated invoicing software makes managing these preferences a breeze. This versatility goes a long way; accommodating customer requirements makes it easier to build lasting partnerships.
Work Order Management Integration
A seamless connection to your larger job management software is imperative. This link removes manual tasks by automatically pulling data from your customer records and notes taken by technicians. Details that should be shared include the:
- Job number
- Job description
- Work addresses
- Main contact information
While boosting productivity, these particulars ensure invoices are built accurately. Plus, they make it easier to organize records and serve as a valuable reference point for your customers.
Automated Calculations
Don’t leave the counting up to your admins! For any amount of bills you combine, your consolidated invoicing billing platform should automatically calculate:
- Taxes
- Discounts
- Totals
Precise figures are essential when creating high-value invoices. After all, calculating and charging the wrong amount can harm your business relationships.
Service Contract Management
Offering and managing service contracts is important for facility maintenance. Depending on your agreements, your team could be called out to perform additional services. The best software ensures mistake-free billing by helping admins easily distinguish which appointments are covered under a service contract or not.
Ready to choose the best invoicing and job management software for your facility maintenance team? Learn more about how Commusoft can help!
Implementing Consolidated Invoicing Software for Facility Maintenance
Commusoft’s invoicing software can help you reinvent your billing processes. Our platform is built for commercial service businesses, helping them organize customers and their multiple work addresses under one profile.
From the job site, you can enable technicians to record accurate service details on their mobile app. From the office, admins will always know which jobs haven’t yet been invoiced and can set an internal reminder to guarantee nothing falls through the cracks.
When it’s time to invoice, your admin navigates to the customer page, then reviews the outstanding invoices. You can bill based on your customer agreements, whether that means creating consolidated bills based on job types, service location, or simply every job within your billing period. Next, all your admin needs to do is select the bills to include, and which email the invoice will be sent to.
One invoice, one email, one payment – no more stress and disorganization!
Furthermore, Commusoft offers powerful integrations to accounting and payment management platforms including QuickBooks, Sage, GoCardless, Stripe, SumUp, and more. Taking full control over your billing and payment processes has never been easier.
Getting Started with Consolidated Invoicing Software
How you manage invoicing and payments for your commercial facility customers directly impacts business relationships and company growth. With essential billing information organized into one workflow, your service team can streamline processes, improve cash flow, and enhance customer relationships.
Ready to start building consolidated invoices with Commusoft? Schedule a call with our team and transform your billing management today!
Emma Bozenda
When I'm not writing about the best digital solutions for trades businesses, I'm either playing with my three dogs, or baking sweet treats!