sværm GmbH

1. Life before easybill

I don’t want to beat around the bush: accounting and I are not friends.

At university, there was a module made up of “classic” bookkeeping, public law, and cost accounting. To pass the module, you needed at least 50% of the total possible points. With top marks in public law and a basic understanding of cost accounting, it was just enough to scrape through the course—like a car roof slipping under a falling barrier that was really only supposed to let the car in front through.

Of course, my destructive attitude toward accounting was bound to come back to haunt me at some point. Maybe not today, not tomorrow, but eventually.

One day, when I was working as a Digital Marketing Manager at svaerm GmbH and was supposed to set up a new project, I had to create a quote. Without a template—just with Microsoft Word. At that point, I didn’t yet know about easybill, and in our small, young company there still wasn’t a dedicated accounting department.

Creating the quote—including all the formulas, corrections, and formalities—was painful, inefficient, and also a little bit embarrassing.

2. The Road to easybill

I learned about easybill by pure chance. We partnered with an influencer whose invoice had something wrong with it. The VAT ID was missing, I think. To confirm whether everything was okay now, she sent me a screenshot from the easybill backend.

“Invoices, quotes, and delivery notes in just a few clicks with easybill,” I thought, “that sounds like it was made for me!” I took a quick look around the website and called support, where I spoke with Daniel Großkopf, from whom I requested a phone onboarding session.

“With easybill, we’ve seen a huge increase in efficiency, and the documents are error-free except for very few exceptions—even though we’re not yet using all features to their full extent.”

3. Onboarding

But I didn’t get a “phone briefing”—that would definitely be the wrong term. Calling it holistic onboarding is better: Daniel Großkopf configured most of the settings for us, in real time, based on our input. Using a live example, he immediately explained what he was integrating where and why, and how we can adjust it ourselves if needed.

During the process, he asked what system our agency uses to assign quote and invoice numbers, whether we sell only services or also products, whether we calculate with fixed hourly rates, how many invoices we write per month on average, and a few other details. From our art direction team, Daniel Großkopf received svaerm stationery and the fonts so that all documents would be compliant with our corporate identity.

After one hour of setup and another half hour of cosmetic corrections—as befits a design-savvy online marketing agency ?—the entire onboarding was complete, and we could start working with the software right away.

4. Our Advantages with easybill

• Quick to learn: Even my colleagues who didn’t take part in the onboarding found their way around super quickly. Using the drag&drop builder is very intuitive.
• Fewer sources of errors: In quotes and invoices without easybill, calculation errors can creep in, or the document layout can get “wrecked” through incorrect handling. easybill does the calculations flawlessly, and the documents always look great.
• Major time savings: Creating quotes is much faster than the “manual” route. You can preconfigure text modules as well as products and services and load them at any time from the clipboard. Invoices can be created based on quotes, so only the scope of services needs to be adjusted if not all services were delivered exactly as quoted.
• Easy corrections: svaerm is the online marketing agency that thinks ahead. That’s why something often changes from the original briefing, or our customers add something toward the end of the negotiation phase. With easybill, corrections no longer feel like an “open-heart surgery, Microsoft Word edition,” but are actually quite easy.
• Overview from anywhere: The documents are stored securely in a cloud. After logging in, they can be accessed from anywhere via a browser, even on the go via smartphone. The tax office can access them, and our sales team uses the storage as a “second filing system” to simplify coordination.
• High degree of customization: Custom service modules and text excerpts, your own stationery, layout according to specifications, intelligent methods for assigning customer, quote, and invoice numbers, and much more adapt to our requirements and processes.
• First-class support: Daniel Großkopf guided us excellently through the onboarding. But even afterward, he and his colleagues were and still are always there for us. We wanted a second list level for bullet points to be implemented. With the next easybill update, the feature was implemented and we were informed. We were also supported through the VAT change from 19% to 16% during the coronavirus crisis.
• Fair prices: easybill is affordable, and the packages grow with the size of your company.

5. No Disadvantages with easybill

• Still stylish: Support occasionally emphasizes, in response to our high standards, that easybill isn’t design software—but we have no reason to complain. Our quotes and invoices look exactly the same as before, when they were still being assembled in Word for hours—only now it’s much faster.
• All formalities are correct: The documents meet the legislator’s requirements, and internal special cases can be mapped without loss—as long as no gross negligence is committed during use.
• Works offline too: The local in-house filing system can continue to be maintained as usual. All documents can be exported to PDF format and printed.

6. Closing Statement

Thanks to easybill, accounting hasn’t become my passion, but to be fair it’s much, much more tolerable than before. The overall easybill package impressed us so much that our partner company Mai Communications—an agency for brand communication and design, founded in 2000—also implemented it.

We should add that we use it to a maximum of about 30%. easybill can do much more. For example, there is in-app email sending, automated dunning, a DATEV interface, a range of extensions for online shops, and so on…

Even though we only use some of the functionality, the investment has paid off many times over—for both agencies.

In a short thank-you speech at the Christmas dinner, management recognized my efforts to introduce easybill in front of the entire workforce. That personal recognition made me very happy, and I’m glad to share that joy with easybill in the form of this success story.

My recommendation for your company: Introduce easybill. Don’t let “digitalization” in Germany—the developing country of digitalization—be an empty buzzword; start now—with digital quotes and invoices.

7. About the Author

Maxim Bollig works as a Digital Marketing Manager at svaerm, a Frankfurt online marketing agency with core competencies in marketing strategy and content marketing. The agency was founded in 2018 with the mission of creating swarms of followers around brands.