Getting paid faster in tough times
It’s always a strain on your client relationships when you have knock on their door and ask to be paid. But during tough economic times, collecting from your clients is even harder than usual.
For anyone looking for some guidance navigating collections, Simona Covel and Kelly K. Spors have penned a great article in the Wall Street Journal with some examples of how to do it right:
Marc Levine, chief executive of the company, which has 350 employees and $40 million in revenue, began personally calling customers who were more than 30 days past due. He says he explained that he needed to be paid because his business was suffering, too.
“I made sure I told them how much we loved them,” he says, “but in order to do a fine job in serving them, I needed them to accelerate payment and return my cash flow to where it was in summer ‘08 and prior.”
Notice how Mr. Levine uses these tough times to increase communication and personalize the collections process. These themes were consistent with other examples in the article.
At FreshBooks, we believe the currency of our business is relationships. We’ve also seen in the past that top performers from the FreshBooks community are client centric professionals – businesses who maintain strong relationships with their clients. So there was little surprise when we discovered that FreshBooks users as a whole actually collected their money faster in Q4 2008 versus Q4 2007 (on average 14 days, down from 15 days) despite economic trends being reported throughout the media (source: FreshBooks’ quarterly benchmarking service). Kudos to the FreshBooks community!
If you know anyone who works hard to maintain their client relationships and is looking to get paid faster in 2009, you may want to recommend they start using FreshBooks. If that sounds like you, sign up and get started with FreshBooks for free.
Copyright © 2000-2009
3:37 pm
We made $55,000 in the end of 2008 because of Freshbooks.
We needed to get some clients to commit to work with us for 2009. While on the phone we sent them invoices via Freshbooks. This is December 24th the day before their year end.
If we did NOT use freshbooks we would NOT have been able to get them the invoices fast enough to be “billed” before the year finished.
Freshbooks has been the single biggest improvement to our cash flow.
Still wondering if it is worth your time to try Freshbooks. Ask yourself this, how much money could I make if I had someone always making sure I get paid?
That’s Freshbooks.
Do the math! Even at $14/month, you save time and money. A bookkeeper in our area charges that much an hour.
Your cash flow is the lifeblood of your business. Bar none this is not an expense it is an investment in your business, clients and lifestyle.
One last example. We landed a major client (one fo the top 3 insurance companies in the US) for a trial program. They had to have a vendor who could accept credit cards.
On a Thursday I researched the Freshbooks suggestions added an account with Authorize.net to our Freshbooks account and my bank.
By Monday we had credit card access and were doing business with the client – all through Freshbooks.
We are a small company, but our invoicing doesn’t look it.
4:44 pm
Steven – It’s wonderful to hear stories like this and you should know I sent your comment around to the entire staff here at FreshBooks. Thank you for sharing and congrats on what sounds like a great 2008, and what’s shaping up to be an amazing 2009.
6:28 pm
See you in Miami at FOWA, I would love to buy you a drink. You can contact me offline.