The Secret to Getting Paid Faster

How long does it take your business to collect payments? 30 days? 60 days? 90 days? More?

If you’re not taking advantage of innovative tools such as accounts receivable automation, it might take your business longer than you like. Automation decreases steps for labor-intensive tasks such as invoicing.

Invoicing and collecting payments represent the lifeblood of business. After all, a lack of incoming payments from customers can impede the development and progress of your company, dampen cash flow, or even lead to short-term borrowing. Many organizations, however, struggle with getting invoices out quickly and following up—which means that it takes longer to get the money you need to thrive.

Enter: Accounts receivable automation. AR Automation will help you get invoices out the door AND collect them more quickly.

Automation and AR

Doubtless, you’ve heard about automation. It often pops up in business articles, news and interviews, so it may feel like an overused term at times. However, it deserves the over-exposure since automation offers tangible results in terms of efficiency and productivity.

Automation simplifies a process by allowing a cloud-based service to take on administrative tasks. In the case of accounts receivable, do you and your staff want to spend hours a month creating, addressing and mailing invoices? Or would you rather focus that time on more productive and profitable outcomes for your business?

Accounts receivable automation—offered by Bill.com—digitizes the entire process and can create and send invoices in a matter of moments, saving time, resources, and effort. The result is that it can be far easier with automation to collect payment more quickly.  

Wait—I can set up and send invoices that easily?

Instead of pulling data from multiple resources such as remittance information and amounts due, populating a template and then printing it out to mail, Bill.com eliminates any paper and takes it entirely online. Paper, stamps, envelopes, and excess administrative time are no longer needed to complete the task. You can work from an invoice template or clone past invoices, select the customer, add in the amount owed and attachments if necessary and your invoice is ready to send.

Within Bill.com, specify when you’d like to send the invoice (immediately or on a selected date). The invoice will be automatically sent with a simple message, which you can customize as you like. A quick click later, the invoice is finalized, delivered online, and received by the customer. (This immediately eliminates the lag in delivery that often accompanies hard copy mail delivery.)

The same set of actions—with a few tweaks—also enables you to establish a recurring invoice. Should a customer have the same amount due during a regular amount of time, a recurring invoice can be pre-populated and delivered on the correct date. You determine the send dates, end dates, and click save. Then, your customer receives a digital invoice automatically—sparing you the time usually spent towards duplicative efforts.

Your Automated Collections Support

What’s your plan for addressing late payments? While you might rely on phone calls or emails from accounting, it’s far more efficient to plan out and automate your approach before you even send the invoice.

Sometimes it takes a gentle nudge (or perhaps a more persistent one) to spur payments. Whatever the case, it generally takes time from someone’s day to contact a customer to remind them.

Bill.com gives you an automated boost to save you time. The system will send out auto-reminders to your customers when payments are due or overdue. You determine the frequency of the auto-reminders—either one or a series. You can customize the messages and then schedule their delivery.  For example, if a customer hasn’t paid and payment is due in 5 days, you can send out an email to remind them. Is payment past due? Send messages when it’s 1 day overdue, 1 week or 1 month—or longer. Whatever best fits your company’s needs.

AR automation from Bill.com gets those invoices out the door, but don’t take our word for it. Try is risk free here.