A billing staff is the intermediary of the operations and accounting departments of a company. Often seen as a subset of accounting, a billing department's duties include the translation of a company's services or goods received from vendors to the services or goods performed for clients.
Vendor Bills
A billing staff has the responsibility of receiving all invoices or bills received from vendors. A vendor is a company or individual who provides a good or service in exchange for payment. The billing staff must pass these bills from the operations department, where the liability was originally created, to the accounting department, where it must be recorded.
Client Bills
Clients receive bills and invoices that are created by a company's billing staff. This duty includes combining and processing the vendor invoices into bills or invoices sent to clients. There are several methods to create client invoices, the most popular being a software program such as QuickBooks or Peachtree.
Profitability
A billing department is largely responsible for a company's profitability. An essential duty of the department is to not only receive vendor bills and turn them into bills for clients, but to include a markup in-between to create profit for the company. For instance, if a company purchases a vendor good for $100, they may then want to sell the item to the client for $110, creating a 10 percent profit margin.
Dispute Resolution
When a client feels that a good or service is overcharged, it is often the duty of the billing staff to contact the vendor that original provided the good or service and negotiate for a decreased cost. The goal in these situations is to convince the vendor to lower the cost charged to the company, so that a good or service is still profitable when its billed out at a lowered rate due to a client overcharge complaint.
Record Keeping
A billing staff is also responsible for accurate record keeping; accurately documenting all vendor bills, client invoices and the profit margins in between. These records must then be passed on to an accounting staff for booking and processing. The accuracy of such billing records is essential because they ultimately determine the overall financial status of the company.
