Using a check has been a basic staple for decades in mostly all business transactions, whether big or small. But only in the last decade has the emphasis shifted from the age-old check to a number of other different options. It is estimated that today’s consumer uses an average of 3 different payment methods each month, ranging from mobile to online to walk-in and even the occasional check. What we can learn from this is that due to the increasing abundance of choice, consumers value options and the greater the number of option the more satisfied the customer is. Whatever the size of your business, you should be spending just as much time on your billing and payment strategies as you would on marketing and operations. Only with a solid combination of both should you expect to rake in any sort of profit, as these are co-dependent factors in any business.
To begin with, you need to fully understand the full billing to payment cycle. This cycle consists of 7 basic steps, preparing the invoice, issuing the invoice, offering payment channels, taking different kinds of payments, reconciling payments to invoices, banking payments and accounting for the whole payment transaction. A good strategy is to attack of each these 7 core steps separately and plan them out elaborately.
To have a fast bill delivery system, you can follow two of the basic options. First one being, automate the manual billing process. This could mean shifting over from manual billing to email-based deliver. This saves a lot of time and paper waste. The second option would be to let a third-party billing organization to help with the process making it more streamline, this could be handing over your billing and payments to another company or using a digital billing service. Both of these have their merits and fallings and can vary from company to company.
The third step would be to have a user-friendly billing and payment experience for your customers. There are four ways to achieve this, clarity, convenience, choice and control. These are mostly all self-explanatory but in a nutshell clarity would be to have a clear, easy to understand invoice that details exactly what the bill might be and the process of paying it. Convenience would be to make the process easy or comfortable, one of the best ways to achieve this is by making the invoice delivery and payment online, letting your customer pay through the comfort of his/her home. Choice would be to allow your customers the flexibility to view their bill in a number of ways and have a number of mechanics to pay for the bill. Lastly, control would be to allow your customer to be able to control how they receive the bills, store it (and retrieve when desired), calendarize payments to suit them, immediate receipt of payment, and the ability to analyze bill data with ease.
There is a lot more that goes into billing and payment strategies but if you follow the above-mentioned basics, you will see the increase in revenue definitely!