Becoming Profitable

The 3 Part secret of getting paid on time

By January 24th, 2017 No Comments

Image of a pile of un-organised papersWith the rise of modern accountancy and cloud-based accounting systems like Xero, then this is becoming less of a secret, but here’s the 3 part strategy successful business’ are using to achieve stellar growth.

Stage 1: Create Invoice templates

By creating ‘stock’ items in your cloud accountancy package, (such as ‘Create wireframe’ or ‘Make amendments to proof’), not only can you generate quotes and invoices in a matter of minutes, but you also make sure you never undersell yourself. (See our other article on being paid what you are worth).

Stage 2: Set up invoice reminders

Set up a dedicated, automated email prompt for invoices that haven’t been paid.

This means that once you have raised and sent an invoice, you don’t need to chase it – if it’s not paid in the allotted time, reminders are automatically sent until it is paid in full.

(Hint: BCC yourself in on the 3rd and 4th reminder to remind yourself to manually chase up really late invoices)

Stage 3: Set up KPIs

The secret to good business is knowing your numbers. (Ask any Dragon’s Den participant).

So one of the best things you can do is set up Key Performance Indicators (KPI) based on things like your invoice payment rate, so you can see, at a glance, how much of your hard-earned is outstanding, and for how long.

This helps you track payment rates over time, so you can see improvement! Set these up and you’ll see your payment rate double, and sometimes triple.

Do you think spreadsheets are for fools? Talk to us about the brilliant new Cloud Accounting packages.

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