Four Ways Manual Billing Affects Your Scaffolding Business 

You might be wondering why it’s hard for your business to improve their ROI. Your business gets enough jobs, delivers high-quality scaffolding services, equipped with experienced crew members. And yet, the numbers just don’t add up.

If this is the case, you might want to look at the accounting aspect of your business. The problem could lie in inaccuracies and inefficiencies in your manual billing process.

Manual billing is a norm in the scaffolding industry, with accountants manually tracking bills of materials and rental orders. However, it is an error-prone process that causes much bigger problems than just frustrating your accountant.

In this article, we’ll share four ways manual billing could be harming your scaffolding business. Let’s dive right in!

Manual Billing Can Impact Revenue

Manually generating invoices might affect the revenue of your business. Scaffolding projects are highly prone to project changes and delays, which makes tracking every detail extremely difficult when done manually. Even with minimal changes, it’s still challenging to generate error-free invoices due to the large number of moving parts.

These inaccurate invoices can cost you hundreds of thousands each month. Even if you hire another person to help keep track of the scaffolding process, this only adds to your labor costs. It’s a vicious cycle that increases your business spend and damages your profit margin without you realizing it.

Manual Billing Opens Room for Dispute

Manual billing also creates discrepancies and lack of clarity in your invoicing, which might cause a customer to dispute it. As stated earlier, manual billing is risky as it provides plenty of room for error. The bigger the scale of the project, the more challenging it is to trace back every payment, and the bigger the miscalculations. Of course, major miscalculations would alarm customers.

This is a serious issue because it might jeopardize client relationships, cost you money when they delay payment, or even end in a lawsuit. When invoice disputes happen, it’s important for the company to provide hard proof with their calculation. Again, convincing a customer and winning their confidence might be challenging if you’re counting everything manually.

Manual Billing Delays The Payment Process

Scaffolding projects often require changes, and decisions are made across multiple sites by different stakeholders, which makes it extremely difficult for accountants to keep track of every cost. This makes manual billing a tedious, time-consuming task. Generating invoices already consumes a lot of time, but it gets worse when there’s back-and-forth billing as you realize additional costs down the road.

The problem with late billing is that it delays payment. The later you bill customers, the later you get paid. It might also damage your company’s reputation if the invoicing process frequently takes too long, especially when compared with other companies that can generate invoices more efficiently.

Manual Billing Costs Precious Equipment

As manual billing often goes hand in hand with manual inventory tracking, it’s easy to lose track of every rented equipment. When you fail to record damaged or lost equipment as soon as scaffolding is returned, it will be difficult or even impossible to bill the customers with a replacement fee.
This means that you not only lose equipment, but also lose out on revenue as you bear the cost of replacement yourself. It’s a lose-lose situation.

What’s the Solution?

Scaffolding companies have relied on manual invoicing for centuries, not knowing that it could be damaging their profitability. With the advancement of technology, it’s time to consider automated billing.

Automated billing is when computer software automatically generates an invoice based on all data entry made for that project. It’s often generated by a project management program that’s integrated with accounting software, like Avontus Quantify. Quantify does all the tracking and calculation for you, ensuring speed, accuracy, and clarity every time.

Ditch the frustrations and grow your business with Avontus Quantify right now!