How To Get Clients To Pay Their Invoices On Time

Curious to know how to get those dreaded invoices paid on time? Not sure how to create easy invoicing processes for your clients and wish there was a simple way to just get the bills paid? Well, we can’t promise any magical solutions, but can provide you with a few ways that are practical, affordable and easy to implement to help get clients to pay their invoices on time.

If you’re like a lot of small business owners, getting clients to pay invoices can be extremely difficult - and it’s not necessarily because they are delinquent and won’t pay. There are many challenges that every organization faces that prevent them from being efficient or on time with paying their bills. So let’s start this article out with a few key considerations for why clients don’t pay their invoices on time and a few tips for how to make the billing process easier. Ready?

Typical reasons why clients don’t pay their invoices on time

In most cases, the reason why clients don’t pay their invoices on time has nothing to do with you or your business on a personal level. If you think that Mary Sue just isn’t happy with your personality and that’s why she’s not paying her bills on time, we (almost) guarantee that’s not the case. Business, as you’re most likely aware, is extremely complex - on many levels. The challenges that your company faces are most likely very similar to the challenges your clients also face. Here are a few key reason why clients don’t pay their invoices on time:

Missing Invoices - You know that you emailed your invoice to Chad last week and he’s on Net 7, but here we are and - zip - no money has been sent. Well, according to research, this is a common occurrence because many clients lose or misplace their invoices. Email can be challenging to manage and simply sending a link via Outlook or Gmail can easily slip between the cracks.

Wrong Sender - They’re moving quickly and appreciate your services, but yikes - they’ve sent you the wrong email for the person responsible for paying their bills on time. And, Sandra happened to be out last Thursday for an unexpected surgery (which also wasn’t communicated to you) and now she’s under water for days on top of never having received your invoice.

Subjective Terms - You’ve sent the invoice for services, but the client still isn’t clear on what a certain clause is within your managed services agreement (MSA), so they’re unable to process the payment until they’ve received clarification. Until that gets figured out, your invoice has been added to their pile of problems that they’re going to avoid for a bit and most assuredly until they grab that cup of coffee to help them finish out their day.

We’ve only listed three reasons here, but do any of these ring a bell or sound reasonable? The list goes on and as you continue to try to grow your bottom line, it may be wise to begin to think about how to get clients to pay their invoices on time.

If you’re like many businesses or freelancers, billing is a major pain. Not only do you struggle with getting clients to pay their invoices on time, but you also wonder what you can really do with your limited capacity to make the process of doing business easier. And, in a full confession, that’s why we’ve written this blog - we want to help you grow your business by doing exactly that. So here are a few recommendations to help you get clients to pay their invoices on time and make your day even brighter than it was yesterday.

Make your invoices and billing process automated - ‘Say what? I can do this?’ Yes, with Billwaze you most certainly can. And it doesn’t matter what size your company is, a billing management platform like Billwaze can take you out of spreadsheet and manual billing-hell and help you save hours of time and a few major headaches by automating your invoices. Connect your invoicing to time tracking and other parts of your business as well to make things even more efficient.

Align your billing system into one, fluid process - Many times when you’re working with multiple systems or processes you have to use different platforms and mechanisms to get the job done. How exhausting, right? Why not align your existing business systems with a program that integrates with over 1500 platforms and makes your billing one, fluid process? This will help make sure that clients have everything they need (automated or manual) and are communicated with properly to support helping you get those invoices paid on time.

Provide your clients with a single source of billing truth - Does that single spreadsheet or PDF invoice show clients their payment history, open invoices or other pertinent information pertaining to their account with you? We know that spreadsheets have a lot of functionality, but guarantee that they don’t provide a custom portal that clients can securely access to help them pay their invoices on time. With Billwaze, you can provide custom access to clients who struggle with keeping everything together by offering them a single location to help manage their billing.

For less than what you pay for a night out to dinner with a friend in one evening, you can optimize your billing process for every client you work with for an entire month. Right now, we challenge you to start a free, 14-day free trial of our software and guarantee that it will make the process of how you do business easier by optimizing your billing processes and helping streamline the process of getting your clients to pay their invoices on time.