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Hello Community! Are you struggling to get customers to pay you on time, or are you simply trying to find ways to avoid late payments? If so, then you’re in the right place. Today I’m going to share with you some tips you can use when it comes to preventing late payments, following up with clients, and even customizing invoices! Let’s go over these to ensure that you’re set up for success!
Receiving payments
Creating and sending invoices within QuickBooks Online is a great to get your customers to pay you. When using this feature, it is important to remember that every time a customer pays an invoice, you need to record that payment. This will ensure that the payment is connected to the invoice and that your books are balanced.
Pro Tip: If you use QuickBooks Payments to process customer payments, then we will handle all the accounting for you. When your customer makes a payment on the invoice, QuickBooks processes the payment and categorizes it into the correct account.
You can check out this awesome video that walks you through receiving and recording an Invoice Payment alongside this full guide on recording a payment here.
Tips for preventing late payments
Late payments can be more than just frustrating. It’s crucial that your customers make timely payments as it can really throw a major curveball in the flow of your business. According to this article in the QuickBooks Blog, 82% of small businesses fail because of mismanaged cash flow.
So how do you go about handling a late payment? You’ll want to make sure that your approach isn’t aggressive so you don’t loose them as a customer. Let’s go over how you can go about collecting outstanding payments.
You’ll first want to:
- Follow up and figure out what the problem is.
- It’s important to remember that your customer is human too and the late payment could’ve been a moment of forgetfulness or misplacement.
- When you reach out, you want to make sure to do so with a friendly reminder. We will cover more in depth tips on how you can approach these reminders in the next section.
If sending out a reminder isn’t enough, you’ll then want to:
- Provide a solution. Whether this is an installment plan or a partial payment agreement is up to you and the situation at hand.
- If the customer doesn’t budge after the proposed solutions, then you may need to take legal action and consider asking a lawyer to assist with the payment collection.
To prevent any late payment in the future, as listed in the blog article, you can:
Make sure to check out the full blog here for full resources and in-depth information on this topic.
Pro Tip: You can get paid faster with automation. Quickbooks’s customizable invoice templates, built-in payment processing, and automated payment reminder features really do make managing open invoices and getting paid easier a plus. Having the right accounting system can ensure that you’re managing your books all in one place.
Tips on following up with clients
As mentioned above, no business owner wants to deal with a customer that hasn’t paid their invoice, but most likely than not, this situation could be experienced at some point. That’s why it’s important to be proactive and set up systems and processes that can help you take charge.
Here are a few things you can do:
- Check out This guide in the QuickBooks Blog that provides payment reminder letter templates so that you can feel confident writing professional and friendly payment reminders for every situation. Make sure to check it out if this applies to you!
- You can set up automatic or manual reminders within QuickBooks Online when invoices are coming due. It’s important to remember that you want to maintain positive relationships with your customers. So being gentle and empathetic when managing this process is key!
Pro tip: Craft your email with care. Be professional but firm if it is a recently overdue invoice. Make sure to add the word “Overdue” somewhere in the subject line. Check out the full article on sending payment reminders here.
Tips on editing, formatting, & customizing Invoices
An awesome feature about QuickBooks Online is that it gives you the tools to create personalized and professional-looking invoices, estimates, and sales receipts. If you’re trying to enhance your business’ communications, then customizing the layout and appearance of your sales forms will go a long way. You’ll be able to decide what information matters most to your business that you want your customers to see.
Note: Your estimates or invoices will look different depending on whether you have the old or new estimate and invoice experience. Find out which experience you have.
Once you can determine which experience you have, you can go ahead and check out the following resources on customizing your invoice below:
Customize invoices, estimates, and sales receipts with the old experience
Important: The “Standard” template that you will see as your default does represent all your forms. Just know that if you make any edits to this default template, it will apply them to all your forms.
Tip: To customize a specific form and not all of them, you can create a new template for that form first. Once you are done applying any customization to that one new template, you can them make it your default template to save changes.
Check out this helpful video on Customizing sales forms in QuickBooks Online.
Customize invoices, estimates, and sales receipts with the new experience
What’s great about the new version is that you can personalize and update your forms as you go about creating them. Any tools you may need to customize your invoices and estimates can be found on the form itself!
Important: One thing to note is that any customization or logo changes you make to your forms will apply to all your existing and even your future invoices and estimates. Alongside this, any edits to your company info will end up changing it everywhere within your QuickBooks account.
Make sure to reference this video on creating invoices in QuickBooks Online to guide you through this process.
Quick Tip: You can also check out this interactive video, led by Kiala, on all things customization alongside this in-depth help guide.
That’s all the quick tips on Invoicing for today. I hope you learned something new and can now add in an extra tip or two into your toolbox! Like always, please reach out in the Community if you have any questions or concerns. We’re happy to help. See you next time!
