Step-by-Step Tutorial for Generating Accurate Utility Bills Online
Creating utility bills online is an excellent idea, because it helps remove a lot of hassle. You can automate many things, rely on consistent and accurate data, not to mention you can have copies of your bills, as many as you want. All of that helps quite a lot, and it just shows the great, excellent results you can obtain from getting these bills done in the first place. It’s certainly a wonderful idea to opt for bill generation online, and here’s how you can do it.
Why should you use a utility bill generator?
Generally, there are all kinds of reasons why you want to use a utility bill creator. But the most important ones include:
- When you use a utility bill maker, it’s very accurate, and it eliminates many of the human errors that can sometimes arise during this process. It’s extremely helpful, and you get to see that from the start.
- Plus, it allows you to save a significant amount of effort and time, usually you can generate bills in minutes instead of taking hours.
- It’s an eco-friendly process, as you’re saving the environment by not relying on paper bills, and that can indeed be very important to note.
- Most of these utility bill makers have integrations with payment systems, too.
- It’s a better way to increase accessibility, since you can access these bills anywhere, on any device that you want, without concerns.
- You can use a template and customize it, something that will provide you with a more professional presentation. That can allow you to enhance your brand’s power, even if it’s just via generating bills.
Steps you need to follow
Pick the right tool for utility bill generation
It always helps if you choose a utility bill tool that’s comprehensive and highly professional. When you try to find this type of tool, there are very specific things that you need to keep in mind. First, you should have customizable templates and automation. It also helps if you have multi-utility support, cloud access, security, but also integration with payment and accounting systems.
Thankfully, there is no shortage of tools in this niche, and it does make a lot of sense to go with something professional like PayStubble. Of course, you want to assess the feature set and how the tool can help you. That way, it becomes much easier to narrow down the ideal tool that will fit your requirements.
Ensure that the data you gather is accurate
As expected, utility bills are as good as the data they contain. You always want to have meter readings, the service period, tariffs and rates, customer information and the previous balance. It will help ensure that your utility bill is accurate, up to date and without errors. Sometimes, errors can be prevalent, but addressing that and figuring things out will only make the experience much better, so try to use that to your advantage.
Curious about automated data extraction from documents?
Creating a new bill
The way you create a new bill will usually depend on what utility bill maker you’re using.
- But for the most part, you can enter the menus and choose to generate a new bill.
- After that, you will need to add the customer details, mainly the name, address and their account number.
- Once that is done, you can specify the billing period, with start and end dates.
- Now, you want to add the usage data, covering the meter readings you acquired or which were provided by the customer.
- Lastly, you want to apply tariffs and taxes.
Of course, you can feel free to customize everything and make sure that you’re adding all the necessary details. It’s incredibly important to try and integrate all the information when you are creating a new bill. But at the same time, it also makes sense to modify the appearance of the bill, which we will do in the next step.
Customizing the bill’s branding and layout
As we mentioned earlier, you want the utility bill to represent your business, so you can’t just send a generalized, blank bill. You need to try and add your brand’s imagery, and that’s why it makes sense to include the logo, fonts and colors. It also helps if you are adding notes, like customer support details, even the payment terms.
Customization matters for any type of bill. It helps inspire trust in your brand, and it also empowers your brand to appear important and reliable. Whenever you customize the layout, it does make sense to highlight the due date, too. You should do that for clarity purposes, as a lot of people might not see when the bill is due. So, highlighting things does help quite a bit, and it will alleviate a lot of potential downsides, which is something to take into account here.
Review all the info
Even if a lot of the time the utility bill info is acquired automatically, you still want to check. Automation helps, but it’s by no means perfect. What you want to do is to check the usage numbers and see if they match the meter readings. At the same time, you want to see if taxes and rates are applied correctly.
Moreover, you want to see if the customer details are accurate. That’s an issue that a lot of people will not forgive, so obviously you have to address it the best way that you can here. The totals should also reflect all charges as well as any applicable discounts, where possible.
Distributing the bills
The great thing about using a utility bill maker is that most of the time, you can distribute those bills automatically from within the tool itself. You have email delivery, SMS links, a customer portal access, or even printable versions. In general, you want to use a tool that offers multiple channels for delivery. That will only make it easier for you to ensure that the customer gets the tool they need, whenever they need it. And simple things like that will help a lot more than expected.
Other things to focus on
- Once you finish the utility bill and send it, you do want to enable online payments. That should make it easier for you to get paid, and it certainly streamlines a lot of the process.
- You also need to have a system in place that allows you to track payments and generate reports. Doing that will save quite a bit of time, and it certainly proves to make the experience better.
- Storing and securing bills, while also having a backup just in case, that alone can be super useful and something you have to think about.
- There are common mistakes to avoid, too. These include outdated tariffs, incorrect data entry, no payment options, ignoring security or using a very complicated layout.
We highly recommend taking your time when it comes to creating utility bills. Thankfully, a good utility bill generator can help save a significant amount of effort and time. But it’s important to find the right tool, and also learn how to use it. At the same time, you want to do a few trial runs, to ensure that you mastered utility bill making. It will also ensure that you can prevent errors from happening!