Managing your Accounts Receivable

Learning how to best manage your Accounts Receivable is essential in the business world where the name of the game is often cash flow.   These simple steps will help you streamline the invoicing procedure, making the money transfer from your clients’ account to yours as simple as a couple of mouse clicks.

Better Cash Flow through Accounts Receivable Management

Here are several suggestions to get the ball rolling and to save you valuable time and resources with your invoicing duties.

1. In order to make sure you are getting paid—your main objective—send your invoices out as soon as possible, especially since payments usually aren’t due for 30 or 45 days.
2. As previously discussed in the Effective Time Management post, when you set aside a certain time of week to for specific tasks such as sending out invoices, these tasks will eventually become part of your work routine.  If you stay consistent with your invoicing practices, you will be less likely to forget to send your invoices out. Late Friday afternoons would be a great time to do so (assuming your business follows the traditional work week) since you can send out all of your invoices for the week at once, eliminating any oversights.
3. Use an invoicing application like QuickBooks, or our own online EasyBill invoicing service to get you on the fast track to managing accounts receivable. This also leaves you more time and energy to dedicate to the ins and outs of running your business. Before the days of the Personal Computer it was a very arduous full time job just to track one’s clients bills and to organize them in the books. Nowadays there are tools available that facilitate the bookkeeping in ways that make the paper chase appear practically medieval.
4. Be upfront, polite, and clear about how you will bill your clients and what terms you expect. As easy as online invoicing makes the transaction for all parties concerned, it is important to walk first time clients through the process of payment.
5. Regardless of how you bill your clients, the more professional the process, the more trust you will inspire in your business. Personalize your invoices by attaching your business logo to them and provide authenticated credit card transactions for your clients.

SimplifyThis offers an EasyBill invoicing service that’s as easy as pie and allows you to send online invoices in PDF format, receive online payments via PayPal and credit cards, integrate your invoices with your Iphone and Android, automatically send out payment reminder emails, among a host of other funcitons that will simplify your life and business. Sign up for a free-trial today!