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Make Sure You Get Paid On Time!
Take a look at your cash flow. What happens when you are not paid on time by your customers? If they aren't paying on time, you do not have money left over to pay for your staff along with other elements as well like raw goods, utilities, rent, etc. It is vital that you make sure you have a good collection process in place so you can collect the money that is owed to you in a timely manner. Making sure you are paid on time will come down to being aggressive with the customers and making them understand that you expect them to pay on time. Provide your customers with multiple options for paying you. Credit cards, Bill Me Later, PayPal and other programs make it a lot easier on you to get your customers to pay. When they have other options besides cash and check, it can help them to find the money they need to pay you. It is also a good idea to collect at least 50% of the money owed to you upfront. Collecting the money up front will make it easier on your cash flow as you at least have money to pay for the raw goods. Then you need to set up your customers on an automatic enrollment program to get them to pay. This is a great way to ensure that you are getting the customers to meet their payment obligations and it will make it much easier on you to collect without seeming like you are calling and haggling the customers to pay all the time. Once you take an order, send out the invoice. You want to get those invoices in the mail promptly or you will end up dealing with a lot of issues as you try to get people to pay. Getting them in the mail or via email quickly will remind the customers of the importance to pay in a timely manner. If you want people to be quick with payments, sending a timely invoice is one of the only ways in which you can do this. While you may talk to a customer on the phone and you get them agree to terms, nothing is complete until it is in writing. You have to really work on getting a written agreement with the customers if you are going to get them to pay. It is important to consider the relationship that you have with the customers as some people are willing to be better about paying when they have a good relationship with the company. Focus on offering high quality customer service so you can get people to enroll in the payment programs you have established. Work with them instead of against them and people will open up. Depending upon the type of company you run, you may need to consider looking into credit checks before taking orders from some people. There are certain types of people that just have a hard time paying and they do not always do an effective job at paying their bills on time. You need to consider running credit checks on customers before you are taking them on with payment programs as it can hurt your cash flow. |
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