One of the most common struggles in a small business is maintaining a healthy cash flow. One of the most common reasons for this is because customers don’t pay on time. While it’s easy to blame the customer for this, if your company’s accounts receivable (AR) don’t pass muster, then you need to shoulder at least some of the blame.
In this article, we unveil a treasure trove of features Acumenica clients can enjoy in FreeAgent to help you tackle late paying customers and get paid faster:
Invoices that chase themselves
Is there a more annoying admin task than chasing unpaid invoices? You can avoid this irritation by using Freeagent’s automated invoice reminders. Once you've set up your reminder templates, emails will be automatically sent to late payers, and you choose how gentle or stern you want to be. Just remember to keep up to date with allocating the payments as it’s not a good look to chase an invoice that’s already been paid.
Automate the payment process
To improve your chances of getting paid on time, you need to make the payment process as smooth and easy as possible for your customers.
You can set up online payment solutions in FreeAgent like GoCardless for direct debit payments or Tyl by NatWest, Stripe or PayPal for card payments.
Once you’ve connected your FreeAgent to an online payment solution, you can add a button to your invoice which you customer simply needs to click to make the payment. You can also share a payment link via email, WhatsApp or SMS.
Get insights into your customers’ habits
Knowing which of your customers pay on time and which pay late is a very handy piece of information indeed. It allows you to make decisions on whether you should extend credit in the future. If a customer consistently pays late, you may want to rein them in a little, by reducing terms or even requesting a deposit or payment in advance.
Set payment terms according to your customer’s payment history
Once you have this information, you can then tailor each customer’s “account” so that their terms and chasing process etc matches their profile. If they pay consistently late, you can bring down their terms, or increase the frequency of email reminders, or tweak the language a little to encourage payment.
Acumenica are FreeAgent platinum partners and the full team at Acumenica are Freeagent expert certified. It’s fair to say, we are well placed to help you set up and streamline your AR processes. To arrange a chat with one of our experts, please complete the form on our Contact Us page or call 03330 166559.
