Introduce to Collect Payments from Customers
For many small and medium-sized companies, timely collection of cash is an important thing. But when they tolerate overdue bills they mismanage their working capital ratio. Also, the shortage of working capital could adversely affect their business. From this, we can say that business success and continuity is heavily dependent upon getting paid on time.
However, online businesses get an edge over traditional businesses as their payment is received via credit card, debit card, mobile wallet or other electronic payment methods before delivery of the goods or services.
However, there are some steps that you can take to significantly increase the amount and speed of customer payments along with increasing customer satisfaction and can emulate the payment efficiencies of your payment businesses.
6 effective ways to collect payments from customers
Whether it’s the number of customers with overdue accounts or the clients who are reluctant to pay for the job done, getting paid is one of the most frustrating aspects of any small business or startup. Furthermore, the delay in getting payment disturbs your cash flow. But you can still ensure that you’re getting paid for the goods and services you sell by using the following ways:
Accept electronic payments
Electronic payment systems like an ePOS solution enable the payment businesses to collect digital payments and empower their sales. Apart from this, you can also track payment status, accept social media payments and view reports directly from the mobile app.
To offer the best experience to your customers, you can provide them with the features like no monthly limit, online KYC and zero maintenance charges.
Offer multiple payment methods
Easy and safe payments are a vital part of a great customer experience. So with more than one payment method, you can access new business models. Due to which your geographical coverage will get increased and your payment transactions will be more successful.
Apart from this, using multiple payment gateways provides you with great flexibility to customize the payment gateways as per the geographical region or as per the currency of the respective country.
Get invoicing faster
You should prepare customer invoices faster and present them immediately upon the delivery of goods or services. If you do not make your invoicing faster than your cash flow will slow down without any reason.
However, prioritizing your invoices doesn’t mean just sending out the bills to the customers from time to time. It also means to follow up on any invoices that are due. So if you want to get your bills and invoices done faster, then you should integrate a seamless top-up and bill payments solution to make your invoicing quicker.
Collect advance payment
If you are worried about getting your payments back then you can ask your customers for a deposit or a retainer upfront. This is a very common business practice for expensive products and services and no customer will have any issues with it.
For example, if you are offering services, you may charge a nominal percentage of the estimated bill amount as a retainer. Also, you can break the bill amount into equated instalments so your customer does not have to bear the burden of high costs.
The main benefit of the partial payment method is that it ensures you that you surely get some amount even if the customer gets the default on the rest of the bill amount.
Give incentives
Offer small incentives to customers. It will definitely speed up the payment process and also help you to build customer loyalty. Moreover, if the customer knows that making immediate payments can give them some attractive benefits, then they would do them often.
Apart from this, you can also give the stickers with the company logo, key chains, additional features, free trials, etc. These rewards will motivate your customers to make timely payments.
Follow up for missing payments
Sometimes it may happen that you don’t get payments even after sending the invoice to the customers. The reason behind this is that maybe your customers are busy or maybe they have overlooked the payment by mistake. So for this, you can use digital payment software to send gentle payment reminders to your customers from time to time. And nobody would mind such gentle reminders if it is done properly.
To take follow up on your remaining payments, some effective ways are there. The less time will it take for payments, the less hassle you will have to deal with. So it is worth investing to set up the proper systems to get faster results.
Conclusion
If you want to grow your business faster then you should invest into effective methods of collecting payments from the customers. Because if you do not collect money quickly from the customers then chances are there that your cash flow may get disturb.
That is why you should have accurate credit policies in place to perform timely credit checks on the clients. Moreover, having a clear partial payment policy and being upfront about your payment expectations, then your invoices will go a long way towards ensuring that you will get paid and your startup doesn’t get stuck with some bad debt.
Author Bio:Nikunj Gundaniya, Product manager Digipay.guru, one of the leading fintech solution providers, which provides mobile finance application development services. He is a visionary leader whose flamboyant management style has given profitable results for the company. He believes in the mantra of giving 100% to his work.
