Going 'Green' with Vision Invoicing to Collect the 'Green' Faster!
Everyone is talking about “Going Green” these days but like the weather, who really does anything about it? One way to Go Green using Vision is to take advantage of Vision’s ability to email invoices to clients. This process can save your company time and money while saving the planet!
Here’s how it works:
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Once you get your drafts back from the Project Managers, go into Interactive Billing and make your adjustments for held time, changes in percent complete for billing fees, writing-off expenses, etc. Preview your invoices to make sure that each is ready to send to the client, but do not “Accept” the invoice at this point.
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Make sure your invoice template includes images from your letterhead so that the emailed invoice will look like the one that you would mail. Adding images to invoices is really not very difficult and is definitely worth the effort. You can have multiple invoice templates – one for printing on letterhead, one for emailing and one for draft invoices, for example.
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Once the invoices are ready for production, go into Batch Billing, select to print for Active Projects, select “Final Run” as the run type and set to use Billing Terms for AR, Backup, etc. This will produce the invoices according to each project’s billing terms. In the Invoice Template field, select your Email Invoice Template, which includes images discussed above. Then, select to email the invoices to the Billing Contact.
Try this with a small group of invoices to start until you get the hang of it. Then expand to include all your invoices. This method not only saves you time and money (printing and mailing costs) in producing final invoices, but it also gets your invoice to your client sooner which can reduce your cash cycle days.
Taking Green Invoicing to the next level:
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To personalize your invoicing, think about setting up user ID’s tied to your project managers. This will allow you to send the invoices and have it appear to the client that the project manager is the one that sent the invoice.
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Follow-up with the clients to ensure that delivery was successful. Now that you have reduced the time it takes to deliver invoices, use some of that saved time to give a call to your clients to make sure that they received the invoice. This gives you the opportunity to get some “personal time” with your client and to solidify the process
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Add additional email addresses where clients need to have the invoice delivered to multiple recipients.
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Create email templates to personalize the email, give the client additional information and to save time when producing the emails.
Give “Green Invoicing” a try. Save time, money and the planet!
Full Sail Partners assisted Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc., a prominent A/E/C firm ranked on Engineering News-Record's list of the Top 500 Design Firms in America, with the implementation of Deltek Vision across its business. Full Sail Partners built numerous workflows in Deltek Vision such as conflict checking, project initiation, billing, and project status report. As a result, WJE realized an annual savings of about $1.8 million and a reduction in DSOs of 45 days. The cost to purchase and implement Deltek Vision paid for itself over 30 times in just one year. 
