Updated 3/4/2026. Originally published 2/4/2021.
Billing and invoicing can be a long, tedious process, often with manual steps required to ensure accuracy. The many involved pieces and parts can create opportunity for error and throw off your processes. Delays and billing mistakes can also lead to your customers losing trust in you as their provider. It's frustrating for you and it's frustrating for your customers.
Does the whole billing and invoicing process seem like a necessary evil at times? There’s no doubt the administrative tasks associated with billing and collecting can be cause for headache. Yet, one way or another, you need to get paid.
The good news is that there are many points in your billing and invoicing process that can be automated for efficiency gains and increased accuracy. With the help of a well-equipped finance source, you can automate much of your back-office billing and invoicing tasks while increasing accuracy and enhancing the customer experience. Imagine reclaiming all that lost time and channeling it directly into work that actually drives revenue.
The right technology integrations can automate many steps in your process: obtaining signatures, collecting meter reads, validating usage and maintenance billing charges, auditing contracts, and posting remittance. Today we’ll explore how our integrations work and outline the benefits of each.
Send Documents for Digital Signature
Using digital signatures streamlines the entire document process for you and your customers, making it easier to do business. By eliminating the need to return to the office to print paperwork and collect signatures manually, you create a seamless, modern customer experience. Not only does this accelerate the workflow, but in today’s environment it also offers a safe, convenient way to secure required signatures, ultimately helping you close sales faster.
Measuring Usage
If you’ve ever been responsible for manually collecting or submitting usage data, such as copier meter readings, you know how tedious and time consuming the process can be. Automation speeds things up significantly, and a direct connection to your ERP ensures usage is captured accurately, so errors do not create delays.
With the right integration, usage readings and related details, including invoice numbers or pass‑through charges for services and supplies, can be submitted automatically to your finance source. This level of automation helps you avoid missed billing windows and makes cash posting more efficient.
Pass-Through Automation
In addition to usage charges, it’s helpful to automate the inclusion of miscellaneous fees outlined in your agreement so they appear directly on customer invoices. Along with your existing bundled payment, our pass‑through automation functionality with ECI e‑automate makes it possible to automatically bill items such as supply freight, IT services, or other service‑related charges on a single invoice. This eliminates tedious, time‑consuming tasks like creating separate invoices or entering charges manually.
As a key step in the 1nVOICE® systematic process, Pass‑Through Automation pulls the charges defined in your agreement from your e‑automate system and displays them on your customer’s invoice, creating a truly automated single‑invoice experience.
RELATED: Learn about the GreatAmerica integration with ECI e-automate
Usage and Maintenance Validation
Have you ever submitted a meter or maintenance charge to your finance company only to discover later that the amount they created doesn’t match what you billed? With maintenance and usage validation, you can be confident that the charge invoiced to your customer aligns with the receivable in your system.
Contract Validation
A major challenge for solution providers with Cost Per Copy (CPC) or Cost Per Image (CPI) contracts is maintaining billing accuracy. Without the right integrations, data must be entered separately into both your internal system and the system used by your finance company. This dual‑entry process is time consuming and increases the likelihood of human error, which can lead to billing discrepancies, customer frustration, and wasted effort.
With the right integrations, data can be pulled directly from your system and validated against the information in your finance source database. By confirming that your contract details match what your finance source has on file, you ensure accuracy across maintenance billing, usage billing, and escalations. This proactive alignment helps ensure customers are billed as intended.
Cash Posting
When you choose to work with your financing source to automate billing and collections, you may wonder how you’ll receive your portion of the service and supply charges. At GreatAmerica, we handle this by posting pass‑through funds directly to the open receivables in your system. This removes the manual steps involved in closing invoices and allows you to bill recurring charges on the same invoice as the financed equipment.
Technology integrations create time savings at every stage of the process. They reduce errors, eliminate tedious manual tasks, and ease the workload on your billing and administrative teams. At the same time, they enhance customer experience and help establish more efficient, scalable workflows for the long term.
Stop the Billing Chaos
GreatAmerica excels at simplifying business, whether through streamlined billing solutions, efficient sales tools, readily available team members, time-saving integrations, or simply by delivering on our promises. Curious about how we can help? Better billing is just a click away.
