Billing is the registration of a job to demand its corresponding payment.
Invoicing is the act and result of billing : making and/or delivering an invoice . An invoice, meanwhile, is the document that presents a detail of the services provided or the products sold and that is given to the buyer or client to request payment.
Record of work carried out
Invoicing, in this way, is the process through which a company or a professional registers work performed, so that they can request that said work be paid for. The notion also refers to the set of invoiced elements and their sum .
Billing can be understood as a legal requirement . Whoever carries out a commercial activity has the obligation to issue invoices, since this documentation is essential for the application of the corresponding taxes.
Every invoice generated by a clothing sales outlet, to mention one possibility, includes a tax component . It is not the same to bill 1,000, 5,000 or 800,000 pesos per month: as billing grows, so does the money that must be delivered to the State as taxes , because they are usually determined according to a percentage of sales. .
Until a few years ago, billing was reflected in printed documents (that is, on sheets of paper). With the advancement of technology , electronic invoicing is now common. In this case, the seller or service provider must access a computer system and enter the transaction data to generate a digital document, which is then sent to the client/buyer via email.
Types of electronic invoices
Electronic invoicing does not refer to a single way of capturing said record of operations in a digital document , but in this area we can also distinguish at least two types according to their format, which can be structured or unstructured . In the first we find invoices that can be generated automatically through a computer system, both by the sender and the receiver. Let's say that it is a document that contains data that does not require the intervention of a person to prepare it because it respects rigid language.
The unstructured format, on the other hand, is one that is not encrypted in any language. It falls within the scope of electronic invoicing because it can be sent by email or other electronic means, but it is nothing more than an image. In this case, if the recipient wants to register an invoice of this type in their computer system, they must do so manually or by using a reliable character recognition program, which can "read" the image and capture its data in a database.
Agility and greater reliability are two advantages of electronic invoicing.
Electronic billing: advantages
Without a doubt, saving resources is the first point that jumps out. Both to be aware of the impact that forestry exploitation has on the environment and to reduce input costs, digital emission is much friendlier than the use of paper and ink. Another advantage can be seen in the times, which are much shorter: from issuance to shipping, the process is more agile . This can also be noted in the space required for storage, which is counted in centimeters compared to traditional archive buildings.
Fraud is a concept that is often mentioned in the field of billing; Using specialized computer systems greatly reduces the possibility of manipulating values. Even when there is no ill will on the part of the issuer, human beings are much more prone to making errors than computers, so another advantage of electronic invoicing is the greater degree of correctness.