Are you getting paid in business? You should be but a lot of companies these days are getting short changed. Either, clients aren’t paying their invoices or customers are getting their payments in late. This can leave a company in a difficult situation where they don’t have enough money in the accounts to stay in the green. When that happens, it can push the company into debt, leading to a difficult recovery period. As such, it is important that you make sure you are getting paid for your services. But how can you do this? Well, there are a few options that you should consider.
Invoice Factoring
Let’s say that you have a lot of late invoices that haven’t been paid to your company for services that you completed weeks or even months ago. This type of situation is quite common, particularly in industries such as manufacturing. As such, you can consider using an invoice factoring service. With invoice factoring, you can sell on invoices that haven’t been paid to people who will collect on them, usually with interest. Meanwhile, your company gets the funds it needs, and you get paid for all your hard work. Invoice factoring is a tad risky because it will sour any relationship you had with the client. But you have to ask yourself whether you’d want to provide a service to them again anyway if they are going to pay so late.
Keeping Track
The other option is to make sure that you are keeping track of any outstanding invoices. You can do that by using an online invoice service. Using invoices by the leaders in the space of online services provides you with the great possibility of keeping track of all your payments. As such, you should never be left in a situation where you don’t know when you’re going to be paid. You’ll even be able to provide reminders to certain companies who have fallen into a routine of paying you late and give them a push to complete their payments. It’s a gentler way of getting your payments without resorting to invoice factoring.
Payment Options
In some cases, the best way of avoiding late payments might be to offer customers as many ways to pay as possible. For instance, you might be selling expensive items, and in cases like this, it’s appropriate to offer credit payments. That way, even if the customer doesn’t have the money on hand, you can still get paid and then the debt to be collected is in the hands of the credit company, not yours.
You should also be aware that some payment schemes actually allow clients and customers to pay late and you want to watch out when offering these services. For instance, if you’re accepting payment by PayPal customers can choose to pay only when a product has been shipped. While this might be useful for the customer, it can play havoc with payments for a small business.
There are always options if you need to make sure you get paid for the services you provide as a company. Don’t get taken advantage of, even if it is by your own clients.
Founder Dinis Guarda
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