E-BILLING systems are allowing companies to reduce costs and achieve greater efficiencies.

 These systems can connect to any accounting system and allow invoices and statements to be sent out at month-end at the press of a button.

 "With e-billing it is not such a mission at month-end, there can be no excuse about customers not receiving them, and if there is you can just push a button to send them a copy," says Howard Rabinowitz, MD of E-mail Connection.

 He says e-billing was once the exclusive domain of bigger companies, but now businesses of all sizes can benefit from it.

 "We did a study that shows it costs an average of R30 to fax an invoice, if you include the time it takes to photocopy it and then fax it," says Rabinowitz.

 "Companies' internal systems are not built to send out large volumes of e-mail attachments and the extra traffic can have a significant impact on network bandwidth during month-end peak periods," says Rabinowitz.

 He says his company is sending just under 12-million pages a month of e-billing for customers, and has capacity to cater for 25-million pages a day.

 The company has developed software with compression techniques that enable document attachments to be sent out in the smallest form to minimise bandwidth overheads.

 The service will integrate with any accounting system.

 The client company receives a report about which documents have been delivered to which e-mail addresses, and is notified of any returns.

 "We have a specialised document management system that can be used to scan proofof-delivery documents and tie these to the relevant invoices."

 If there is a query on an invoice the proof can be emailed to a customer while they are still on the phone, he says.

       
    Apr 28 2004 08:19:07:000AM  Business Day 1st Edition