Sending out your bills can be a fun time of the month—when you view the financial fruits of your month’s labor—or it can be a stressful mess when you realize you haven’t recorded work you’ve done and you realize the bills are going to have to go out late. But there are two main reasons you need to be punctual about billing.
First, it’s courteous to clients and it’s also expected from them. If you don’t send bills at the same time each month, you won’t look professional and clients will decide, fairly or not, that if you won’t send bills on time, that they won’t pay them on time.
Second, you need to be paid on time so you can manage your cash flow. You need to be able to rely on your estimates of how much money is going to be in which account and when. If you play fast and loose with sending bills, it’s going to throw your ability to pay your own bills into a tizzy.
So keep your records updated each day and set aside the time you need at the end of your billing cycle to generate your bills. If you do that and if you take the time to customize your software and enter client information, it’s not so painful.
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