Recent studies show that one third of corporate law firms and a bit less than 50% of small law practices use electronic billing. As more companies require their outside counsel to provide electronic invoices, law firms are shifting to e-invoicing. Industry experts anticipate that the majority of law firms will make the shift within the next decade. Yet the process is slow. Compared with other fields, attorneys seem resistant to the idea of e-invoicing.

Why are law firms hesitating to take up e-billing? Electronic invoicing saves money, time, and resources. It offers greater security and shortens the payment cycle, improving cash flow. What's not to like?

Bloggers in the legal field offer us some clues.

• There is a perception that legal invoices are too complex and variable to work with electronic invoicing software.
  
• There is concern that invoices may be rejected, requiring follow-up. E-invoicing, the writers feel, wouldn't catch these rejections, so human time would still be required for follow up.
• There is a perception that billing clerks are so inexpensive, relative to the overall costs of a legal firm, that there is no point to going electronic instead.

SmartPay is highly customizable, so we feel that the first concern is  unnecessary. Unlike expensive specialized software, SmartPay is designed to work with business of all kinds and sizes. Clients reach a secure portal which is completely customizable, and the details of invoicing are fully under the SmartPay user's control. Our specialists are glad to help firms with set up.

If legal firms believe that their invoices are likely to be rejected, we won't argue with them. However, SmartPay is set up to make it easy for businesses of all kinds to track payments. You can see at a glance which invoices have not been paid, and it takes just a click to check the details for dilatory clients. You can re-send the invoice easily, too.

Billing clerks' salaries may not be as high as those of attorneys. Again, we're not arguing on that.  But cost savings, while they are important in today's economy, aren't the only reason to switch to e-invoicing. 51% of consumers, according to a recent study, prefer electronic invoicing for ecological reasons. Another study found that 72% of its respondents cited reduced waste and reduced clutter as their reasons for favoring e-invoicing. Law offices value our environment highly, we know.

Among businesses using electronic invoicing, quicker turnaround for payments and the opportunity for workers to spend time on higher-level tasks were listed as primary benefits of e-invoicing. Law offices can surely appreciate these benefits. In today's economic climate, we think it's time for legal firms to look seriously at e-billing. We think that SmartPay is a practical partner in the effort to update. Contact SmartPay to learn how e-invoicing can work for you.

SmartPay's new video tour shows you just how easy it is to use SmartPay for your invoicing. If you've been thinking that it might be time for you to switch to e-billing, go watch the tour. You'll be happily surprised to see how practical and intuitive the sysem is.

Right now is the best time to streamline your office systems and get ready to be more competitive. Watch the tour, and then contact us to discuss how SmartPay can make a difference for your business.

We recently had a comment saying that medical professionals would soon have no choice of whether or not to bill electronically. With HIPAA and HITECH, the advantages of electronic billing for medical professionals seem overwhelming. We can't imagine why any medical office wouldn't choose to take advantage of the opportunity.

In fact,  SmartPay's paperless invoicing system has so many advantages that we can't really see why any office would hesitate.

But we wanted to know for sure, so we went to an insurance claims analyst at a national insurance company.

"It is true," the analyst assured us, "that we encourage electronic claims for the simplicity and quick turn around, but we always accept paper claims."

We guessed that it was good to have choices, but we were wondering whether, given the simplicity and quick turn around, they might not plan to refuse paper claims at some point in the future.

We had a comment from a reader:

"Excellent post.This is the simplest way of gathering the health information."SmartPay" sounds like a good idea. But...the key, as always is how secure it really will be."

 Security is a growing concern for many of us nowadays. In fact, increased security is one of the many good reasons  to switch to e-invoicing with SmartPay.

First, think about the security level of paper billing.

You receive a bill in the mail and write a check. If you're at home, you put it out in your mailbox, which you don't guard at all. If you're sending a check from the office, it passes through many people's hands before it reaches the mail carrier. Either way, it then goes to a large facility filled with strangers who touch it and pass it along. It goes through more adventures in trasit to the city where you're sending it, with even more opportunities for tampering.

Another mail carrier takes it to its destination, where it passes through the hands of several people before reaching the person responsible for it. That person processes it and then leaves it in an insecure place until time to take it to the bank, where it is touched by many more people. At the bank, of course, it's processed electronically.

With SmartPay, your invoice and payment are processed electronically in the first place. Your transaction doesn't go through dozens of hands, facing the possibility of loss or theft as a check does. 

SmartPay transactions take place at a secure portal. When you think of eletronic billing, you may imagine that your private information is traveling around the internet, available to anyone as this blog post is. This is not the case. A secure portal means that the information goes directly from one server to another. It doesn't enter the same information stream that online information does. It is not on the World Wide Web.

Far from being a security risk, your SmartPay transactions are far more secure. 

What's more, the information itself is much more secure. A paper ledger, a check, a remittance form -- these papers all have sensitive information on them,and few people are really careful with these papers. Someone can see this information and copy it down without your ever being aware that anyone has gained access to the information. Payment systems on a business computer are also available for unscrupulous people to look at, unlike SmartPay's secure portal, where you or your cusomers can see all the necessary data without sharing it with others or leaving it where others can access it.

Computers don't steal money or information; people do. Using SmartPay offers a level of security far beyond what you can achieve with paper billing.

A new study from IDEXX reveals that 95% of customers receiving their bills online prefer it to any other method of receiving bills.That's almost everyone.

It wasn't just that they didn't like change, either. In the survey of 1000 customers, those who received their bills by mail liked that method best only 77% of the time -- a little more than 3/4. Those  who would have been happy with a change generally preferred online billing.

Why did people prefer electronic invoices? It's not surprising to learn, in these time-crunched days, that the great majority of people preferring e-bills did so for one reason: they're easier to organize.

They sure are. 

When you pick up a bill in the mailbox, you have to find a place to put it. Do you file it? And if so, do you file it under the company, the month, the due date -- maybe you just stick it in a big pile of unpaid bills?

When it's bill-paying time, you hope you can find it -- and the envelope that goes with it -- and the stamps.  And then what do you do with the paid bills? File them?

With SmartPay,  your customers receive an invoice, either in their mailbox or at a secure portal. They pay the bill, either by credit card or ACH debit, and they're finished. They can easily go back and check their accounts at any time, without having to sort through papers or remember where they put things.

What about those customers in the survey who felt that they'd like e-invoicing better than the paper bills they were receiving? The company was able to switch them over. They're happier, the environment is a little better off, and the company is certainly happier, with lower costs and faster turnaround on invoices.

It's a win-win solution. 

Visit SmartPay's Features page to learn more about SmartPay electronic invoicing, or contact us to find out just how SmartPay can benefit your business.