Worried About Late Invoice Payments? Get Paid Quicker With These 3 Solutions
Why does it matter if your business endures late invoice payments? Customers will often complain that you’re getting paid eventually, so why is it such a big deal? They usually say this after you’ve chased them up a handful of times, which makes you seem like the irritating party.
Don’t get it twisted; they’re absolutely at fault. Late invoice payments mean you don’t get cash entering your business to pay for general operations. It might not seem like a big deal to a customer, but the difference between getting paid now or in a couple of weeks can mean you miss a key bill or vendor payment.
If you’re not careful, late invoice payments force you to slip into business debt - which is why you should deploy these three solutions to get paid quicker, all the time.
Work With an Invoice Factoring Company
It’s always useful when you come up with a solution that doesn’t necessarily depend on your customers paying promptly. An invoice factoring company is set up specifically to help with this conundrum. For those unaware, invoice factoring is when you sell your unpaid invoice to the invoice factoring company and get a portion of the invoice from them. They usually pay 80-95% of the invoice, giving you a good chunk of money to work into your cash flow.
Then, they collect the payment from your customer and send you the rest - minus a small fee for their services. It’s a really solid idea if you send out a lot of invoices, but can’t afford to wait for customer payments. You get the money now, without getting frustrated or needing to badger your clients.
Send Modern Invoices With Payment Buttons
Again, it’s not your fault that your customers are late with their payments. That being said, you can often make improvements to your invoicing system to encourage quicker transactions. Sending off a traditional invoice that simply lists the total costs and tells your customer when they need to pay won’t do anything to help the payment process.
Instead, you should send modern invoices via email with payment buttons embedded. The benefit of these buttons is that they give your customers a way to pay with minimal effort. They can click a button to use Apple Pay or PayPal without needing to go to their banking app and manually send money. It’s all about convenience for the customer, which should help you get money a lot faster.
Make Customers Pay Upfront
Why don’t you rip up the book and get rid of invoices entirely? Make the customer pay upfront before you conduct any work. It’s not the craziest idea in the world, and it completely prevents customers from delaying payments. You get the money right away, so there’s nothing to worry about.
This approach might not work for all businesses - it depends on what you offer and how you conduct your work. Nevertheless, it’s worth looking into because it eradicates the late payment issue entirely.
Three solutions - each a little bit different - that help you banish the worries of late invoice payments. You can go about this however you want, but the bottom line is that you don’t need to settle for delayed payments or the consequences they bring.
