Waiting on payments is a pain in the neck for any business. It’s stressful, wastes time, and holds them back from growing.
Accounting firms experience this all the time. Clients sit on invoices for months, leaving businesses scrambling to cover expenses while waiting for overdue payments.
What if there was a way to fix this? With better payment solutions, you can help your clients get paid faster and manage their financial health more smoothly.
Here are 11 practical tips to improve your clients’ payment processing:
1. Expand Payment Options
Offering multiple ways to pay helps clients settle their bills faster. Credit cards, mobile payments, and direct transfers provide flexibility.
Clients can reduce delays by offering payment methods that fit their customers’ preferences. People are more likely to pay on time when it’s convenient for them.
2. Reduce Days Sales Outstanding (DSO)
DSO measures how long it takes a business to get paid. If customers take too long to settle their payments, cash flow suffers.
Encourage your clients to send invoices immediately after services are rendered. You can also suggest they:
- Offer early payment discounts to motivate faster payments.
- Set shorter payment terms, like Net 15 instead of Net 30.
- Automate invoice reminders to prevent payment delays.
3. Minimize Exception Items
Typos and missing details create exception items, which delay payments. These mistakes are preventable with automation.
Help your clients use automated systems to reduce human errors. Automated portals can flag issues before submission, ensuring fewer errors and faster payments.
4. Integrate Payments With Back-Office Systems
Manual payment tracking can create bottlenecks. Integrating payments with back-office systems simplifies billing and reconciliation.
This integration allows real-time tracking, reduces manual entry errors, and speeds up payment cycles for your accounting clients. You can also recommend they:
- Use real-time financial dashboards to give themselves (or their team) an instant view of cash flow and outstanding invoices.
- Set up automatic invoice generation based on completed services or sales to ensure billing is prompt and accurate.
- Link payment systems directly to accounting software for automatic updates to ledgers after every transaction.
5. Set Up an Online Client Portal
Set up an online portal to give clients control over their payments. They can view, pay, and track invoices without dealing with paperwork.
Use accounting client portal software to simplify the process. Clients can access their payment information anytime, improving transparency and speeding up payments.
Adding features like automated reminders and real-time updates can further reduce delays and ease the workload for your team.
6. Automate Follow-Up Messages
Automated reminders keep the payment process moving and help prevent late payments.
Advise your clients to use accounting billing software to schedule reminders at the right time, like a few days before the due date or right after it passes.
When their customers get these reminders, they’re less likely to forget or delay payments.
7. Offer Payment Plans
Help your clients offer payment plans for larger bills. Breaking payments into smaller chunks makes it easier for their customers to stay on track.
For example, they can explore different options like:
Buy Now, Pay Later
This allows customers to split payments into smaller, manageable amounts over time.
Installment Plans
These break the total bill into equal payments over a set period, reducing the financial burden upfront.
Deferred Payments
This option will give clients a grace period before they begin paying, helping them manage immediate expenses.
8. Choose The Right Payment Processor
Improving payment systems starts with picking the right one. Your clients can either use an aggregator or a dedicated processor.
Aggregators, like PayPal or Stripe, are simple but often come with higher fees. Dedicated processors give businesses more control, lower fees, and a direct merchant account.
Ask your clients if their current system works for them. If they need more flexibility or better rates, suggest a dedicated processor. Options like Square or Helcim offer affordable, tailored solutions without the hassle of shared accounts.
9. Get Informed on Credit Card Fraud
Credit card fraud can put a dent in your clients’ cash flow. Identity theft, credit card tumbling, and refund fraud are common threats that can impact payments.
Encourage your clients to use payment processors with built-in fraud prevention features like real-time monitoring and two-factor authentication. These measures help protect against suspicious activity and ensure payments remain secure.
10. Track and Analyze Payment Trends
Encourage your clients to regularly track and analyze payment data. Most payment processing systems allow them to generate reports that highlight patterns in customer behavior and payment timing.
Clients can use these insights to:
- Prioritize offering payment methods that lead to faster processing, like direct transfers.
- Target customers who frequently pay late with earlier follow-up reminders.
- Identify high-value clients who consistently pay on time and offer them special incentives.
11. Streamline Compliance
Handling multiple payment methods comes with lots of regulations. Clients can feel overwhelmed by things like PCI standards. A managed payment processing service can help ease the burden by ensuring compliance with these rules.
These services take care of the complicated stuff, like security and regulations. Clients don’t have to worry about keeping up with every new rule or change.
The benefits include:
- Automatically encrypting sensitive customer data to meet PCI standards.
- Monitoring compliance updates and adjusting processes as needed.
- Offering easy-to-read reports to simplify audits and reviews.
Conclusion
These tips can help your clients take charge of their payment process. By using them, they’ll reduce delays and improve cash flow.
With better systems in place, they can focus on growing their business instead of chasing payments.
Encourage them to start today and see the difference smoother payments can make.
