Even if your finance department has a dedicated collections team, the manual processes involved in chasing payments can take valuable resources away from more meaningful work.

Past due invoices are a challenge for many businesses. Over one-third of invoices in the U.S. aren’t paid on time. And it’s not always the customer’s fault–a whopping 11% of invoices are unreceived or get lost in the spam box. 

The good news is that there’s a way to bypass many of these common challenges around payment collections: Automation.

At a time when businesses are digitizing and automating processes at a hyper-accelerated rate, a surprising number of accounting departments still perform reconciliation manually. But now, cloud-based platforms are enabling more and more companies to automate an effort that’s often lengthy, tedious, and prone to error.

Automated billing allows you to set routine billing functions to autopilot — increasing both billing speed and efficiency. Automating a billing system is an involved process, but the benefits of automation greatly outweigh the costs. If you’re still using manual billing processes, it’s time to consider making the switch. Read on to learn about five steps you can take to automate your billing system.