The cheque is in the mail !

The Cheque is in the mail!   

Cheque is in the mail

Does that sound familiar ?

If you are like most of our small business clients, you have a stack of money owing to you out in the market.  I’m not talking about sunk money where the customer has gone walkabout or bankrupt.  Hopefully you have very few of these.

• I’m talking more about that regular client who asks you to send an invoice but is not in the office immediately to pay it.
• I’m talking about that Property Manager client with 30 day credit terms who always forgets and misplaces the invoice by the time 31st day rolls around, and you have to send him the invoice for the umpteenth time.
• Or the nice regular client who was meant to pay you last week but forgot because of one thing or the other.
• How many times has it happened in the last week where the accounts receivable team have had to resend the same invoice multiple times?

Does this problem sound familiar? Fret not my friend, welcome to the #AccountsReceivablesClub

Cashflow 101 for a small business calls to make sure that the invoices are being paid on time every time. But how do you do that in the real world when you already have a 1001 things to do ?

Well, Technology to the rescue.

We recently designed a payment follow-up system for jobs to solve and automate exactly this cash flow problem and attack overdue payments before it becomes a monster too big to manage.

Here is the crux of how the system’s automated workflow looks and works.

1. The job is completed as normal in simPRO.
2. When the job is completed and invoiced in simPRO, the invoice is automatically extracted out of simPRO into cloud based system for automatic follow-up.
3. The first time invoice is emailed out of simPRO to the client upon completion of the job.
4. Herein starts the magic of automatic follow-up.  Based on the settings of that particular job, or a standard rule for all jobs, the system can automatically follow up with the client on a repeated set cycle until the payment is received.
5. Two days after the original invoice sent out, the client gets an SMS with the amount job number and a link for payment.
6. Five days or on a set schedule say the next Tuesday 2 Pm he gets another professionally designed email with a link to the actual invoice and the option to pay online.
7. Seven days later he gets another professionally designed email with a link to the actual invoice and the option to pay online. A gentle reminder, constantly reminding the client of how valuable their business is and how important it is for you to receive their payment on time.
8. On the 8th Day 8:00 Am in the morning, an SMS reminder this time.
9. 10th Day An automated ROBOT call reminding the client about the overdue invoice
10. 15 DAYS: A sterner email Demanding Payment, threatening loss of client privileges and more.
11. A legally valid letter in the mail”Formal Demand for payment” If it is still not paid after this then it all goes to PLAN B.
12. In Twenty Days:  An Automated list to the accounts receivables team of the invoices that are pending with visibility on how the customer has been responding to the emails thus far.

Whether the Invoice overdue reminder emails opened ? How many times were the emails opened ?  Did the customer download the Invoice ? Did he click on the “Pay Online Now” link but didn’t make payment?

Now when the Accounts team see the report they can take a decision on whether this one is for the Collections or does the customer need to be put on aggressive follow up and COD Terms only.

This is a sample, of course you can customize it to your specific follow up.

Regarding the emails themselves, they would be no different to the emails that you get from your Utility provider or your Bank for that matter.  You can assume, all of these larger organisations are tracking if you opened the statement ? if you checked the email ? and how is payment correlated with reminders ?  Why should such systems only be available to the big end of town, you already using simPRO a world-class job management system, now you can supercharge your invoice follow-up, kill cash flow problems and free up your accounting staff do more interesting real work rather than just chase payments.

We love solving challenging puzzles that can bring a smile to our customers, oh and we can do all kinds of simPRO api blackmagic ????