Cashflow is so important to the health of any business but even more so for a small business. If you don’t pay attention to your debtor days (how long its takes you to get paid) and get caught in a debtor daze then you run the risk of placing unnecessary strain on your cashflow. Let’s face it, the last thing you want to be doing is making those dreaded calls to chase urgent payment out of your own desperation.

If you prefer to keep your payment reminders more traditional and email/post works, it’s best for you have a look into your accounting system and see if there is a way that you can automate your payment reminder system. Software programs such as Xero and MYOB offer solutions which can streamline this for you.

An option we suggest is to leave the letters for ‘repeat offenders’ or debts that are well overdue. Most debtors aren’t there because they don’t want to pay you and usually its simply because they have been busy, distracted, forgotten or misplaced your invoice.

So why not incorporate some more ‘out of the box’ methods to chase up and collect payment whilst not leaving your debtor feeling that you are annoying them unnecessarily ?

TEXT IS BEST

It’s easy for a debtor to ignore a letter or email that you send them, but a text message ‘ding’ on their phone is quite hard to ignore. It has been proven that this method has a much higher success rate in receiving payments more promptly. The key here is to ensure that your texts are light hearted, friendly and not forceful.