One of the most common causes of poor cashflow can be traced back to invoices – and more importantly – not invoicing on time and correctly!
3 ways to improve your invoices, and therefore cashflow are:
- Invoice as soon as possible when work done – this one really is key – once you’ve completed the work/made the sale raise the invoice and send to your customer – the sooner they have it the sooner they can pay it! Build into your processes a step to raise and send your invoice so you don’t forget – plus so you do it at the earliest possible opportunity. If you invoice on sale/completion – add a step to your workflow as soon as the job is done. If you have monthly retainers raise the repeating invoices as part of your onboarding. However you work find the best solution and implement it asap. And please don’t invoice at the end of the month for all the jobs/work completed during the month – this really is the easiest way of giving your customers extra time to pay!!
- Ensure you include a due date – you’d be surprised how many invoices we see that don’t have a due date or terms of any kind on their invoice! How can you expect your customer to pay if you don’t tell them when they need to?! They’ll more than likely not bother to pay, and forget, meaning you’ll end up chasing unnecessarily! If you’re using a software like Xero then this will be taken care of for you – you can’t raise and send an invoice without one!
- Use at least one payment service – there are a number of payment services available to help speed up the process – GoCardless, Stripe, PayPal, iwocaPay – all of these services can be added to your invoices automatically through Xero and will really help in getting the cash into your bank! Why not check them out and see if one, or more, can help you get your invoices paid quicker.
If you’d like some help addressing your invoicing or cashflow problems complete our quick questionnaire and book a discovery call with me.
