Businesses in rural areas may hesitate to switch to electronic invoicing.

Some customers may still be on dial-up internet service, or may not have internet service. There's lower demand for e-invoicing in rural areas, studies tell us, in the sense that customers don't ask for it and businesses are less likely to offer it. Government programs requiring a shift to e-billing often make an exception for rural areas. The perception is that electronic billing is just an urban thing.

That perception may be wrong -- or at least changing. The same studies found that people in rural areas value e-billing and take it as a sign that a business is tech-savvy and cutting edge. This makes the business more appealing, and may encourage customer confidence in the company.

On  a day to day level, rural customers may find it less convenient to get the bill into an envelope, find a stamp, and mail it than urban dwellers do. This makes e-invoicing a greater convenience for the country dweller. 

And, while it is true that rural areas may have up to one-fourth dial-up internet users, cell phones are just as ubiquitous in the country as in the city. 97% of American adults have a cell phone, and ten million of us use our phones to access the internet.

One of the factors that leads to greater success for an ebilling solution in a rural setting is using an email payment setup. SmartPay, for example, allows customers to pay directly from an email if their internet connection is too slow to make the use of the secure portal practical. Businesses can even accept phone payments for customers who aren't ready for online payments.

With this flexibility, rural businesses can gain the many benefits of electronic invoicing -- from cost reduction to greater environmental sustainability -- and gain, also, from the perception that they are more tech-savvy, and therefore more up to date and expert, than their local competitors.

Most small businesses have to spend a certain amount of time every month chasing down payments. Some people are late on payments because of the economy, some because of a temporary issue -- a medical or family emergency, an unforeseen expense that throws off the household budget, or a reduction in work hours -- and some because they actually don't intend to pay. 

The majority, though, just let time slip by and forgot to make that payment. Unfortunately, the business spends as much time on  the casually late payment as on the customers who aren't able to pay.

The solution is an autopay set up. Customers can set up automatic recurring payments through SmartPay and have their bills paid automatically. The benefit to your business is obvious -- no more time spent on unnecessary collections efforts, quicker turnaround on payments, and more predictable cash flow. 

The customer benefits, too, from the convenience of having bills paid without having to remember due dates.

A study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago found that one of the primary obstacles to a complete shift to electronic billing was customers' desire for greater control. Being able to make a partial payment or to change settings for an ebilling account would, the Reserve found, make more difference to consumer acceptance of e-invoicing than education or attitude change.

On the SmartPay screen above, you can see how easy it is for customers to make changes to their autopay arrangements. Most will never choose to do so. The sense of control given by having the ability to make changes if they need to is enough to make most consumers comfortable, and allow them to enjoy the convenience and security of automatic billing.

The New York Times recently reported on the level of success medical practices are having in their shift to electronic billing.

There are two groups that are succeeding, according to the report. First, the largest companies. They often have insurance departments of their own, so the economic benefits are more immediately obvious. There are more people involved, too, and therefore there may be a higher tolerance for inefficiency and acceptance of a learning curve. Funds are in place to provide training and support -- and even motivation --  for months ahead of the switch. The organization may go a custom route and develop their own system, often including electronic record-keeping of various kinds in the process.

The image is one of a giant ocean liner steaming majestically, if slowly and in a cumbersome fashion, into a new direction.

The other group is the small practice. 75% of the doctors in the United States practice in groups of ten or fewer, a third in offices with only one or two doctors. Fargo has two major hospitals, and a higher concentration of physicians than more rural parts of North Dakota, but we still see most of our medical professionals in small practices. These practices have been successfully converting to electronic billing first, with the intention of shifting entirely to electronic record-keeping over time.

The New York Times describes these changes as "heroic." They're reporting offices in which the first step toward e-invoicing was the purchase of a computer. They're talking about months spent in training and in typing records into the new system. In fact, more than 90% of U.S. physicians are already online. With online electronic billing systems such as SmartPay, initial investments in software and in training are minimized.

Set-up of the system can certainly require quite a bit of data entry if all records have previously been kept on paper. However, we all have to admit that the all-paper office is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. If all an office's records are kept in physical files, then a switch to electronic billing gives the impetus to make a change that should have been made years ago. Even in offices where the only computer records of patients are in simple spreadsheets, transferring the data to a system like SmartPay is only a matter of importing files.

Feeling heroic yet?

Small practices may actually be better suited to making these necessary changes. Agility is one of the strengths of the small practice. A system like SmartPay, with costs based on the number of invoices sent out, is well-suited to a small office. Savings in time, postage, stationery, and collection efforts make the shift to e-invoicing a cost-effective one, and we don't think it really requires heroism.

Just smarts.

As summer ends and fall approaches, we hope you're taking time to enjoy the natural beauty of our world. And as we marvel at the glories of nature, we have to think about our own responsibility for our environment.

Switching to SmartPay electronic invoicing is one of the simplest, easiest, and least painful things you can do to help the environment. 

Think about it: 10% of all the trees cut down in our world go on to be used in the process of billing and paying bills. We could save nearly a million trees every year by switching over to electronic invoicing.

Creating paper invoices takes up so much energy in a year that -- if all businesses went paperless -- we'd save enough electricity for 20 million households. Electronic invoicing does of course use electricity, but only the electricity already in use by the computers which are already operating in our homes and businesses. No additional electricity is consumed by using SmartPay.

The world's invoices, according to a recent report, could fill up 10 football stadiums each year. That's 240,000 tons of wasted paper. Some are thrown away, contributing significantly to the waste stream, which is 40% paper. Some are saved, taking up space which is heated and cooled and otherwise served in ways that require fuel consumption -- and those saved papers, too, will one day enter the waste stream.

When you consider that e-invoicing also saves money and time, it's hard to see any good reason for continuing to use paper invoices.

Switch to SmartPay. Who knows, you might save enough time to get out and go for a walk before the cold weather comes.

Dilbert's question -- "You want me to ask our vendor if his software will hunt down our payroll data from across the internet and try to kill it?" -- is funny because it restates his boss's humorously inaccurate idea about internet security in an exaggerated way.

But there probably were plenty of readers who didn't get the joke at all.

After all, many of us use the internet without understanding it. Many of us, for that matter, use electricity without understanding it. You push a button, the magic happens. If that's your mental image of how something works, then it's no surprise if you have only the faintest idea of what dangers and safeguards there might be in using it.

When the telephone was first invented, people had some concerns that seem funny to us now. For example, people worried that a woman might call a man -- and he would answer without being properly dressed.  He would not, you see, have realized that it was a woman who was calling him! The exclamation point is there to help you reaize that people found this idea shocking and distressing. They probably couldn't have articulated exactly what consequence that situation might lead to, but it worried them. We can't really reproduce the mindset that made this something to worry about, because we have relaxed about phones, whether we understand them or not.

We've relaxed about electricity, too. We know that it does have some dangers, but we don't usually worry that it's leaking out of our light sockets. People used to worry about that.

Just so, those who worry about the security of online EIPP services like SmartPay are worrying unnecessarily just because they don't understand that e-invoicing is more secure than paper billing.They can't articulate just what might happen or how it could possibly happen, but they worry.

We thought Dilbert was funny today. But we don't agree that people who worry about the security of online financial transactions are ignorant or foolish, as the cartoon implies. It's a natural reaction to new technologies. And Onsharp's SmartPay electronic billing system is prepared for that. You can help your customers become comfortable with the SmartPay system by using a telephone option until they become confident about using SmartPay themselves.

At that point, they'll also see the humor in this cartoon.