07.05.2025
Are you keen to know which invoicing method is best suited to sending and receiving your invoices? Find out in our article how full costing can help you make decisions.
Full costing also enables the costs for various invoicing methods to be calculated. This is especially easy with our calculator.
Increased efficiency, reduced costs: this is what companies achieve with full costing. It is useful for calculating the price of a product or service, for checking processes and business models and for comparing planned and actual costs.
Full costing distributes all planned or actual costs during a period across different cost bearers – both individual and overall costs. The aim of full costing is for the price calculated for products, goods or services to cover all operating costs. This makes it suitable for long-term planning.
Full costing is not suitable for products with a market price. As the calculation is not based on usage, the calculated price ends up too high. It is also important to remember that the calculated price relates to a specific quantity. If this changes, a shortfall or surplus occurs. Companies should therefore use both full and partial costing .
There is no general rule as to the interval at which costing should be carried out. Which costs you want to calculate, when you want to do it and to what extent depends on your individual requirements. This means you can simply perform full or partial costing as required.
By calculating the price for individual costs and overall costs, you can optimize processes. For instance, you can calculate and compare the costs for various invoicing methods, e.g. post, e-mail or digital invoices such as eBill or B2B e-invoicing. To see what full costing might look like for sending and receiving invoices, let’s look at examples with paper-based invoices.
Didoio AG sends its invoices by A Mail and wants to know how much the costs per invoice are. To find out, the company adds up the time needed for all the different processing stages (excluding returns management):
To calculate the costs for an invoice, the company also needs the internal hourly rate for invoicing. At Didoio, this amounts to 60 francs. The company also has to factor in 40 centimes for material costs (letter paper, envelopes, ink cartridges) and 1.10 francs for postage.
For a total of 45,000 invoices a year, the cost of sending invoices amounts to 202,500 francs a year for Didoio AG.
Didoio AG receives its invoices by post and wants to know how much the costs per invoice are. To find this out, the company adds up the total time needed for all the different processing stages:
To calculate the costs for an invoice, the internal hourly rate for invoicing is also needed. At Didoio, this amounts to 60 francs.
For a total of 70,000 invoices a year, the cost of receiving invoices amounts to 630,000 francs a year for Didoio AG.
If you carry out full costing adapted to your company for all invoicing methods required, you will get a good overview of costs. The more automated the process is, the cheaper it becomes. Generally speaking, we can say that sending/receiving invoices electronically works out cheaper right from the first year, and even more so in subsequent years, despite implementation costs. The invoicing method you choose ultimately comes down to various factors (e.g. customer acceptance, supplier service, etc.) and is a very personal decision.
Find out more about this topic in the article “Electronic invoice exchange – the key points” and the whitepaper “Billing Solutions – receiving B2B e-invoices”.
Companies use e-bill B2B to send electronic invoices directly to their business customers’ accounting software with ease.
By using eBill, companies enable their private customers to pay and receive invoices digitally and easily with e-banking.
Paper Bill saves companies the job of printing and sending paper invoices and optimizes returns processing. Companies are also supported in digitizing their invoice recipients.
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