Re-introducing Financial Cents: All-in-one practice management solution with integrated billing

Getting client work done can be hard. Getting paid for it shouldn’t be.

Financial Cents knows that billing is more efficient when done in the same software for clients, projects, and team management.

That is why WE ARE EXCITED TO ANNOUNCE OUR NEW BILLING FEATURE.

Thanks to the precious insights from our community of accounting firm owners, this feature enables accounting firms to:

• Bill their clients on time.
• follow up on invoices automatically.
• Get paid faster, and
• Improve their accounts receivable turnover.

The billing feature comes at NO ADDITIONAL COST and brings us closer to our goal of becoming a one-stop software for your practice management needs.

Features of Financial Cents Billing

a. Ability to Create One-off & Recurring Invoices

The billing feature lets you create invoices for your one-off projects, but that’s only one aspect. You can also automate recurring invoices to save you the administrative burden of remembering (and creating) these invoices from scratch every week or month.

To create a one-off or recurring invoice:

Click Create Invoice.

• Select the client to bill.
• Choose between one-time and recurring.

• Select client reminders (to automate your receivables)

• Send or Schedule the invoice.

b. Sync Invoices and Payments with QuickBooks Online

Going back and forth between your billing and accounting solutions can break your workflow process.

Thanks to Financial Cents integration with QBO, your payment data in Financial Cents synchronizes with your QBO account.

With this feature, the status of your invoice and payment in Financial Cents will appear in QBO to prevent duplicate information and ensure complete and accurate financial records.

c. ACH & Credit Card Payment Options

Whether you prefer ACH payment (for its affordability, security, and convenience), credit card payment (for its ease of use, processing speed, and availability), or both; the Financial Cents billing feature accepts both payment methods.

The processing fees are:

• ACH transactions: 1% capped at $5.00.
• Credit & Debit Card transactions: 2.9% + 30 cents.

d. Saved Payment Methods

When your client uses a method to make a payment, Financial Cents automatically saves and authorizes it for future payments.

With this feature, Financial Cents improves your accounts receivable by eliminating the need for clients to remember (and manually enter) their payment information before making payment, which improves your overall client experience.

e. Automatic Payments & Authorized Payments

Some of your clients might be too occupied with their core business operations to authorize your payment every month.

That is why this feature provides the option of automatically charging your client’s account as and when due.

The feature uses your client’s payment information on file to automatically charge them for your services. Financial Cents will send your client the invoices after each payment.

f. Automated Client Reminders

Your clients can forget to make payments for any number of reasons. That’s where the Financial Cents payment reminders come in.

The reminder feature automates your receivable collections by following up with your clients until they send your payment. This frees up your time to focus on meeting client deliverables.

Getting Started with the Billing Feature: Step-by-Step Guide

You can start using the Financial Cents billing feature in three (3) steps:

• Set Up Online Payments

Accepting payments in Financial Cents begins with filling out the merchant application.

Click the billing tab to provide relevant information and start processing payments inside Financial Cents.

• Connect with QuickBooks Online (Optional)

This syncs your service items and payment information between Financial Cents and QuickBooks Online.

Here are the steps to connect your Financial Cents with QBO.

•   Go to settings
•   Select Integrations
•   Click +Integration
•   Select Connect to QuickBooks
•   Select “Sync Invoices to QuickBooks Online” on the integrations page here

• Schedule a Call with Our Payments Team

If you need additional help setting up the billing feature, our payments team will assist you by showing you the billing platform in more detail and migrating your invoices and payment methods.

Book a call with us here.

Key Benefits of the Billing Feature

a. Centralizes Billing and Payment Collection

An inefficient billing process causes late payments and bad debts that affect more than half of American businesses.

The first step to encouraging timely payment is to centralize your billing and payment collection processes, which helps you track your paid and unpaid invoices in one place.

Financial Cents makes billing and payment information more accessible with:

• An Invoice Dashboard

The billing tab shows all your invoices and their statuses (draft, outstanding, paid, and overdue) in one central place.

To view individual invoices, open an invoice with the click of a button to see more granular details or go to the client’s profile to see their active invoices (with their saved payment methods).

• Filter

You can filter your invoice dashboard to see invoices by particular due dates, statuses, or recurrences.

b. Saves Money

The Financial Cents billing feature helps you save money by reducing ACH processing fees and giving you the ability to pass credit card fees to your clients.

ACH Payment processing in Financial Cents is 1% of the transaction (with the maximum fee capped at $5). This is lower than QBO’s ACH payment processing, which is not capped. Although the QBO ACH fee is also 1% per transaction, eventual charges can be significantly higher.

For credit card transactions, Financial Cents allows you to pass on the fees to your clients to pay for it.

Since the Financial Cents billing feature does not attract any extra cost, it saves you the hundreds of dollars you would have spent on a separate billing solution.

c. Saves Time

Using a manual billing system (or even a separate software for your billing) requires time to enter billing data and verify that they are accurate across the board.

The Financial Cents billing feature stores your client’s payment information after their first payment, enabling the automation of subsequent payments. With our QBO integration, you can pull service items from your QBO account.

This helps you regain time for client work that generates revenue.

d. Streamlined Operations and Tools

Billing your clients in Financial Cents gives you one platform to manage every aspect of your firm. This means fewer software applications to learn and keep up with.

This prevents information silos and enhances collaboration and productivity in your firm. It also improves client collaboration by providing clients with one place to access documents and communicate with you.

• Improved Client Experience

Easy payment processing is as important for client experience as your client onboarding processes.

Having one place for all client-facing processes helps your clients interact with your firm more easily. Communicating with your clients in Financial Cents and sending them elsewhere for billing creates too many touchpoints that can ruin the client experience.

• Reduced Admin Overload

Between data entry, verification, and payment collections, the billing process can be a handful. Each of these tasks can increase your unbillable time by several hours.

With the Financial Cents billing feature, you can create estimates, verify billing information, follow up (with clients), and process payments with a few clicks.

This will not only reduce your administrative burden but also eliminate human errors that might lead to late payment or bad debt.

Financial Cents Billing Feature: What’s Next?

Now that the billing feature is live, we will spend the next weeks adding features that will make it more comprehensive for our users. These include:

• Invoicing off billable time (WIP REPORT)

The work in progress (WIP) report in Financial Cents shows how much resources it has cost your firm to do a client’s project to its current stage.

This will give you reliable data to bill your clients accurately.

• Proposals & Engagement Letters

This feature will enable you to create professional proposals and engagement letters to close deals faster, define the scope of work, and manage client expectations for a smooth business relationship.

• Ability to Pass Credit Card Fees On to clients

Paying for all credit card transactions will cost your firm thousands of dollars annually.

This feature will enable you to push that cost to your clients by automatically adding credit card processing fees to their invoices.

• Ability to Lock Time Entries Once Invoiced

Editing time entries after a bill has been sent to a client can create confusion and make your billing system inaccurate.

This feature will allow you to prevent your employees from editing their time entries once the client has been billed for it.

• Ability to Lock Deliverables Behind a Paywall

This feature will optimize your receivable collections, by rendering the documents and reports you created for clients inaccessible until they pay their outstanding bills.

• AR Report

The AR Report feature will help you see your outstanding invoices and how long they are overdue. This will help you find the best ways to follow up on your unpaid invoices.

• Client Utilization Report

Every firm wants to provide all the services they can for each client, but how can you tell how many more services you can offer a client without the right data?

The client utilization report will help you understand how many services you currently provide for your clients versus how many more of your services they need.

• Staff Utilization Report