5 User Experience Tips to Turn Your B2B Invoicing Process from Drama to Delight
What’s the difference between cookies and your B2B experience? Cookies make people happy. There is a risk that there is an unhappy persona in your B2B experience — your Buyers Accounts Payables persona.
The B2B Accounts Payable persona holds more power in the B2B purchasing process than product designers give them credit. When you add the drama of manual work and auditing to their life, then be prepared to experience the impact of late payments and potentially lost deals.
How do you create a delightful experience for the Buyer Accounts Payable Persona? Here are 5 Tips to make the process as delightful as fresh cookies for your Buyers.
Invoices that are not approved by Accounts Payables, do not get paid. Having a PO number is critical if the payables process demands it. Therefore, on each invoice with the ability to correct that number AFTER the purchase provides relief in reissuing and disputing invoices. It also decreases the impact of user errors and confusion in the case of Buyer Persona has fat fingers.
2. Provide terms that fit their corporate guidance.
Your biggest customers pay in 30, 60, 90 or 120 days. Your invoicing system needs to be flexible enough to offer this at the customer level. Your CFOs purse also needs to be flexible enough to offer the terms that their customers want. If that is not possible, look to outsource that customer experience to the many companies that provide “credit-as-a-service.”
3. Make it easy to integrate into their invoice and procurement systems
Your biggest customers buy from countless B2B suppliers — at scale. In order to maintain corporate governance, they have invested in an AP or P2P (procure-to-pay) automation system (Ariba, Coupa, etc.) to check prices, store documents and ensure that all purchases are approved within governance. As a supplier, ensure your invoicing process is easy to integrate with and invest in beautiful UX. If you cannot prioritize it, outsource this to a partner that specializes in it (i.e. a partner that already has 20+ AP system integrations ready).
4. Consolidate invoice content to decrease their individual tasks
Your highest volume purchasers do not want an individual invoice for every transaction. That mountain of paper is a mountain of work for the accounts payable department to ensure the PO number is correct and the pricing is right. Invoice flexibility means being able to consolidate bulk purchases into one invoice. It also means ensuring that the right SKU detail and attachments are configurable per customer (e.g. adding a scanned copy of the signature or bill of lading).
5. Provide easy-to-follow deal verifications to increase trust
In B2B, there are often contracts before the purchase that guarantee discounts for increased volumes, or discounts for particular items at a SKU level. While an invoice is going through the approval process, often a manager or Accounts Payables team member needs to verify they were charged the right price or received the correct rebate. Reconsider the UX of your portals and PDF documents to increase the positive feeling of green checkmarks and verification affordances.
Bonus Tip: Put a link to your W-9 on the invoice. In user research on invoicing, a main paint point for the Buyer AP is needing a W-9 from the business supplier to set them up as a vendor for 1099 reporting on their taxes. Imagine a Buyer Accounts Payables pain to follow up with every supplier if they do not provide a handy link.
Kirby Montgomery is a post-it note advocate, a practitioner of “data + design” user-centric problem solving, and an extreme prototyper. As the current Director of Product for MSTS, he leads teams to build software platforms that remove the drama of B2B invoicing and collections. In addition, Kirby is a co-founder of TheraWe Connect where he is on a mission to help parents of children with disabilities navigate the world of pediatric therapy.
Originally published at https://medium.com on May 3, 2019.
