PAPERLESS BILLING PROS AND CONS SOFTWARE

This usually comes at startup time, but has a nasty way of popping up at exactly the wrong time.

Regardless of your political persuasion, if you have run a pest control company, chances are you have had unfriendly, or at least stressful, run-ins with your local city or state government. Paperless systems will recoup your costs quickly. A good paperless system will automate redundant daily tasks like customer notices, sending billing reminders, charging cards, and keeping records, thus allowing your good people to hire, train, and manage new people to run new branches or expand existing ones. A key in manageable growth is you want your good people handling new people, locations, and fleets and not doing redundant daily work. Now when you are growing, you probably have already found some good people and promoted them to management. When expanding, the hardest thing is finding good people. The goal is to do this with as little issue as possible. For those of us who have opened multiple branches or operated multiple fleets we know that in doing this you can count on everything going wrong and then some. thus rendering incorrect information a thing of the past. And oh yeah, good systems will not let employees save their work without correctly filled out work orders, notes, etc. As mentioned above, since (good) paperless systems restrict what employees can actually do and record to what you deem correct, training almost becomes a non-issue.

PAPERLESS BILLING PROS AND CONS SOFTWARE

A good paperless software company will already have tutorials and support lines open to aide you and your employees in training and learning a new system so your cost is mitigated. Some important ones are new employee training and scalability. Systems using alot of paper restrict growth in many ways. This helps with new employee training, too. No more trying to figure out what the tech really serviced, meant, or did. This may seem restrictive, but think about it, 98% of the time, notes on invoices come from the same bank of notes. Techs and secretaries can only type in predetermined notes on invoices and work orders set by the owner. This can work wonders on accounts that deny or scrutinize your service (not to mention governments). With a paperless software system, copies of work orders are always saved. These issues can be eliminated or reduced with electronic copies of everything. How many times in the past year have you ran around with your head cut off scrambling to put out fires around the office? Now, how many of those things involved paper (or the lack/missing thereof)? The answer is, probably most of them. These things cost time, which we already discussed, but they also cost the owner something harder to quantify: sanity. From poor tech and secretary handwriting to lost paperwork, to incomplete work orders and partially filled out info, the list rolls on. Systems that still require alot of paper to function (calendars, invoices, work orders, reports, etc) always bring two things with them: frustration and headache. So, if you are thinking about whether a switch to a paperless system is worth the up front costs, let me answer that: YES, it is. If you pay your employees an average of $15.00 an hour, you just saved your company $15,000 a year. Over the course of a year, thats 60,000 minutes. In an office with 5,000 active quarterly customers, upwards of 5000 minutes can be saved per month across the company (at a rate of 3 minutes saved per service). At first, a few minutes a day may seem trivial. Time savings come from reducing the redundancy of work, meaning only doing something once, like collecting customer info, billing, sending invoices, entering customer work order info, etc. In pest control, paperless software saves maybe a few minutes per customer per day. Oodles of time, loads of time, bucketfulls of time. Here are a few of the pros and cons to consider. I have seen many offices switch, or attempt to switch, to paperless systems. There are many benefits to a paperless system, though quite frankly, paperless software systems are not for everyone or every situation. Going paperless in your pest control office has been given alot of attention lately.

Paperless billing pros and cons