Transform your finance workflow with Email for Trello! We take a closer look at how strategic contact management can help your accounts team process invoices quickly and effectively.

Quickly process invoices and bills with contact management in Trello! In this article, we take a look at:

• What contact management is, and why it’s important for invoicing

• How to manage your contacts in Trello with the Email for Trello Power-Up

• 5 ways to improve your finance processes using Email for Trello’s CRM (contact relationship management) features

Let’s dive in!

Why is managing contacts important for invoicing?

Managing your contacts effectively is an important part of customer service across all industries! With a comprehensive database in place, finance teams can offer personalized service, track client interactions, and ensure invoices are sent (and paid!) on time.

A strategic approach to contact management enhances customer satisfaction and helps invoicing teams adapt more effectively to their customers’ needs.

What is contact management?

In short, contact management is the organization and maintenance of customer information. Managing your contacts effectively helps your team improve their financial administration services and offer better customer service – so it’s important to have the right tools for the job.

How to manage your email contacts with Email for Trello

The Email for Trello Power-Up makes it possible to connect a shared email address to your Trello board, so that you can manage your contacts, emails and tasks – all in one place! Our advanced CRM features help invoicing teams to:

• Keep accurate records. Maintain a comprehensive database of contacts, notes and email conversations! With all your customer and finance data in one place, it’s quick to create and send accurate invoices.

• Collaborate in real time. Greater visibility also makes it much easier to collaborate with team members, prioritize tasks and allocate resources. For example, if someone is off sick or out of office, your team can still pull the right data, and get invoices sent and paid on time.

• Reduce time-to-invoice. Everyone has complete transparency, which ultimately improves customer service by encouraging timely responses to incoming emails and helps you go from quote to invoice quicker.

Find out more about managing your invoicing with Email for Trello.

5 ways to improve your invoicing processes in Trello

Let’s take a closer look at how contact management works in Email for Trello, so that your finance team can get the most out of our powerful CRM features.

1. Keep your finger on the pulse with the activity feed

The Email for Trello activity feed makes all your emails, contacts and tasks visible at a glance. This can help financial services teams to:

• Spot bottlenecks quickly. Greater visibility means it’s easy to spot any hold-ups with invoices that need to be sent or bills that need to be paid.

• Share accountability. With all the information your team needs readily available, anyone can jump in to assist. This empowers team members take a proactive approach and keeps your invoicing pipeline moving.

• Triage tasks effectively. When assessing the urgency of tasks, team members can easily see which contact or organization has made the request, and give appropriate preference to priority clients. For more information about triaging tasks, see how to set up a triage board in Trello.

Learn more about how to streamline your invoicing workflow with the activity feed.

2. Discover new business insights

The overview provided by the activity feed is not only a powerful tool for finance teams looking to improve their response times and react quickly to real-time change. It’s also a really valuable way to discover new business insights, so that you can take proactive steps to optimize your invoicing processes and improve customer support.

• Monitor service levels. The ability to view team, contact and email activity across accounts can help you see outstanding invoices, monitor what’s being done, and plan for how to improve.

• Make data-driven decisions. The activity view can help you spot trends and notice areas for improvement. Using this knowledge, you can apply your insights for better team communication and invoice management.

3. Save time with contact import (and export)

Manual data entry can be a real time-suck for busy teams! Take advantage of Email for Trello’s easy import functionality so that you can:

• Save team time. Importing contacts in bulk saves valuable time – and makes migrating your accounts inbox into Trello that much easier!

• Ensure accuracy. Batch uploading contacts eliminates typos associated with manual uploads. Plus, we automatically take care of any duplicates!

If you need to share contacts with external collaborators, or simply do a data backup, you can also export your contacts in just a few clicks. Learn more about contact import and export on the Email for Trello blog.

4. Keep your contacts organized with groups

Email for Trello makes it possible to group contacts by organization for better ease of reference. This is especially useful for finance teams invoicing across multiple clients or companies:

• Keep contacts organized. Organization groups give you a better overview of your contacts, allowing you to see all correspondents associated with a single organization at a glance. Plus, we automatically assign new and existing contacts to the correct organization based on their email address!

• Improve knowledge sharing. Team members can see all conversations in the context of a single organization, making it easy to stay up to date and keep track of the bigger picture.

5. Make record-keeping easier with custom notes

Custom notes are great for organizing extra details relevant to your contacts. For example, your finance team might want to add custom notes for client invoicing preferences, specific payment requests, or even reminders for other team members. This can help to:

• Make record-keeping easier. Keeping notes maintains a record of past interactions and observations, which can offer useful historical context and inform future decision making.

• Improve team communication. Shared insights and updates make it easier to collaborate with colleagues, because everyone is working from the same set of information.

Learn more about adding custom notes to your contacts in Trello.

Transform your invoicing workflow with Email for Trello’s contact management features

Improve your finance processes with contact management in Email for Trello! Make the most of our powerful CRM features to ensure accuracy, foster accountability, and improve collaboration – so that you can pay and get paid quicker.