Nibletz Staff
There is literally nothing worse than having provided an excellent service and product to a customer, and then having them drag their heels overpayment. It’s a nightmare! It puts all of your accounts off and can make you seem like you are unreliable to your service providers, as you don’t have the money to pay your bills. It can even make your employees hostile if there pay gets delayed. So how can you deal with customers that are dragging their heels on payments? Read on to find out.
Update your invoicing system
One thing you can do that can help you to deal with heel dragging customers is to update your invoicing system. That means say bye bye to paper invoices and go for a digitized system instead. The evolution of which is described at http://resources.taulia.com/.
But that won’t make any difference you say, as both ways, they have the invoice and are not paying, right? Well, some customers are going to be difficult but for most having this instant system can definitely increase the likelihood of easy and prompt payment. In fact, it’s one of the points that such services as sold on.
Get someone on collections
Next, if you have some customers that are repeat offenders at not paying their bill on time, it can help to have someone in the accounts department assigned to collections. That means it’s part of their role to call up and chase payments that are still outstanding.
This is a role that needs specific skills as described at https://www.indeed.com/. So make sure you look for confident folks, with a good phone manner, that can create a good relationships with those they need to speak to. Remember you always get better results with the carrot rather than the stick, so hold off on cracking out the big guns until late a possible.
Have plan a B
Something else that can help when dealing with a slow-paying customer is to have a plan B in the works. Your plan B should include alternative sources of finance for the things in your business that are essential to its function. Such as business rates, wages, and materials.
To do this is can be useful to agree on an emergency overdraft with your bank, or to look into getting a cash advance from a site like https://www.swiftfinancial.com/ to pay for the essentials. This is particularly useful, as it can allow things continue even if you are having an issue with customer payment. Something that can have a knock-on effect of making the dealing with said company a lot less stressful so probably more effective.
Make paying easy
Lastly, a good way to preempt problem with customer payments is to make it as easy as possible for them to pay. If it’s taking 10 minutes to complete a payment over the phone, or they have to print and send a check, she can just add extra time to a situation that is already behind.
That is why it’s worth considering offering payment through an online service like Paypal. As the easier you can make things the more likely it is that they will get done.
