Cash flow is the lifeblood of small businesses and poor cash flow is often identified as one of the main causes of businesses failure. Key to maintaining healthy cash flow is making sure that your customers pay on time, yet information gathered by Xero indicates that 52% of all invoices are paid late. This leaves the average small business with a £63,881 hole in their accounts.
Maintaining a consistent cash flow is challenging and covid has magnified the problem for many businesses. Chasing payments can be expensive and time-consuming, particularly for businesses without a dedicated finance team. Debt chasing can become an ad-hoc process and people need to be taken away from other tasks to chase overdue payments.
Xero has a number of features to streamline the invoice payment process such as adding payment services, which allows customers to access their invoices online and use the ‘Pay Now’ link to make an immediate electronic payment. As we covered last month, you can also set credit limits to prevent sales being made to customers with significant outstanding debt and you can set automated reminders to remind customers when their invoices are overdue.
Chaser’s quick and secure integration with Xero lets you add a massive range of functionality to your credit control process and offers the following additional benefits:
Chaser allows customers to make payments directly through their invoice using their Payment Portal.
Each Payment Portal is individualised to each customer’s account and offers multiple, flexible payment options for their invoices. Both you and your customers can use the dedicated summary page, which shows the full details of all paid and outstanding invoices. Customers can pay for all their upcoming invoices in one place for an effortless payment experience.
Automated reminder emails are easy to send, but they are also easy to ignore. As soon as a customer realises that a payment reminder is automated, it loses a lot of its impact.
Chaser adds the human touch to automated credit control. This means you get all the streamlining and time-saving benefits of automation, while still having the impact of emails appearing to come directly from a person. By using multiple, intelligent schedules, these reminders can be set to send at varying times and dates to suit your different customer groups, for example, good payers, bad payers or long-term clients. This avoids the homogenous bulk-emailing that is so indicative of an automated service.
Chaser emails appear to come from your regular email address. You can set an email signature to match your standard emails and tailor email templates to reflect the specific relationships you have with different customers.
All communication between you and your customers is captured in the Chaser app and is fully searchable. The content of phone conversations can be added through the note system, keeping everyone on the same page.
Chaser have found that 80% of invoices can be successfully collected through automatic email chasing alone. However, sometimes SMEs need the option to escalate cases further.
Chaser Collections uses a compassionate but firm approach to make sure you get the money you are owed without damaging the relationships you’ve spent time and effort building. Instead of harassing your customers, their ethically-trained collectors act as mediators, helping both sides come to a payment arrangement that benefits all parties.
All of this combines to see businesses using Chaser get paid on average 16 days sooner. We’ve seen the results ourselves and are able to offer the standard or Enterprise versions of the software to our clients at 30% off the regular price.