The Van, the Invoice and the Website

Three surfaces, one of them forgotten

A business that has thought about its identity has usually thought about the van and the website.

The invoice was set up once, in whatever accounting software was chosen, using the default template with a logo dropped into the corner.

Nobody has looked at it since, and nobody looks at it now because it goes out automatically.

Which is unfortunate, because it is the only one of the three a customer files, keeps, and looks at again.

Why the invoice matters most

• It is kept for years.
• It is read carefully.
• It is read at a decision point.
• It gets forwarded to others.
• It is the last thing they see from you.

The third is the one businesses miss. An invoice arrives at the moment somebody is deciding whether the job was worth what it cost, and a document that looks careless is answering that question badly.

The default template is doing damage

Which is worth looking at properly.

Open the last invoice you sent, as the customer received it, rather than as it appears in the software.

Look for the software's own branding in a corner, a typeface that appears nowhere else in your business, a logo squashed to fit, and a colour that is not one of yours.

Then check whether the business name, address, and telephone number match what is on the van and the website.

That last check finds a wrong number more often than anybody expects, since the invoice details were entered once at setup.

Ten minutes in the settings fixes most of it.

A worked example

A flooring contractor had a well-designed van and a decent website.

His invoices went out with the accounting software's default template, a stretched logo, and an address he had moved from three years earlier.

A commercial customer's accounts department queried an invoice because the address did not match the one on file, which delayed payment by three weeks.

He spent twenty minutes on the template: correct details, his own typeface where available, his colour on the header, and the payment terms stated plainly.

The next quarter's invoices were paid measurably faster.

The design change was incidental and the correct details were not.

Payment terms belong on it

Which is the functional half of this.

When it is due, how to pay, what the account details are, and what happens if it is late.

Stated plainly on every invoice rather than assumed from a quotation somebody has filed.

A business chasing payments should check whether its invoices actually say when payment is due, since a surprising number do not.

Put the due date as a date rather than as a number of days, which removes the arithmetic and the ambiguity.

That single change shortens payment times more reliably than any reminder.

Check the other documents too

Since the invoice is the worst offender and not the only one.

The quotation, the receipt, the appointment confirmation, the automated reminder, and any form a customer signs.

Each was set up in a different system at a different time, and each carries whatever that system's defaults produced.

Collect one of each, print them, and lay them beside a photograph of the van.

The mismatches are obvious in thirty seconds when they are side by side and invisible when they are not.

That exercise is the whole of the audit and it takes about half an hour.

Do it once a year, or after anything changes.

Consistency is mostly about details, not design

Which keeps the effort proportionate.

Nobody notices that your invoice uses a slightly different typeface from your website.

Everybody notices a telephone number that does not match, an old address, or a business name written two different ways.

So the priority is the factual details first, the colour and logo second, and the typography last if at all.

A plain invoice with correct details beats a designed one with a wrong number.

Spend the ten minutes on the details.

The van is the one that recruits

Worth noting since it is the surface with the widest reach.

A van parked on a street is seen by every neighbour for the whole day, which is more impressions than most local advertising buys.

What it needs is the trade in large letters, the town or area, and one contact route, all readable from across a road.

A telephone number is more readable at speed than a web address, and both is better than either.

Check yours by photographing it from twenty metres and reading the photograph on a phone.

The confirmation message is a surface too

Which most businesses have never read from the outside.

An appointment confirmation, a payment receipt, or an automated reminder is a message from your business that a customer reads on a phone, and it was written by whoever configured the software.

Send yourself one of each and read them as a customer would, looking for the wrong business name, a placeholder nobody replaced, and a tone that belongs to a software company rather than to you.

These go out far more often than any printed item and are the only surface here that reaches every customer without exception.

Rewriting the three most frequent ones takes half an hour and improves more customer contact than the invoice does.

The counter-case

Some of this genuinely does not matter.

A business invoicing through a portal a client controls has no template to design.

Customers also care far more about whether the work was good than about whether the paperwork matched.

And a business with one van and no employees has fewer surfaces to keep aligned than this suggests.

Open the last invoice as the customer saw it, correct the details first, state the due date as a date, and lay all your documents side by side once a year.

What to do

1. Open the last invoice as sent.
2. Check the name, address, number.
3. Remove the software's branding.
4. Add your colour and logo.
5. State the due date as a date.
6. Collect every other document.
7. Lay them beside the van.

Step two is where the real damage hides, since invoice details are entered once at setup and are never revisited when a number or an address changes.

The arrival moment is covered in uniforms, vans and the site matching.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.