How Your Customer Billing Process Is Sabotaging Your Cash Flow
There is one question a business owner needs to ask herself every morning *
Not billing your customers in a timely manner is one of the biggest cash flow mistakes you can make. Read through the suggestions below to get your customer billing on track.
Problem - You work on your customer billing whenever you can find the time.
Put customer billing work on your calendar, just like you would a meeting.
Do your customer billing at a time and place where there are no distractions.
On the days you schedule billing work, do it very early in the morning before your business opens and before you check your email and voicemail.
Problem - You procrastinate billing a particular customer because you know he’s unhappy about something.
Ask an employee or partner to do the billing.
Discount the billing if you truly believe that’s the right thing to do.
Promise yourself a reward after you’ve completed the billing such as leaving the office early, spending time doing something you enjoy online such as social media or taking a day off.
Problem - Your billing needs to include time and materials, and it takes you hours to gather together this information.
Put an accounting or tracking system in place to gather this information and delegate the tracking to an employee.
Delegate the billing to an employee and be involved only in the review. Have the employee also provide documentation of the time and materials for your review.
Consider hiring a part-time billing clerk to do customer billing.
Problem - You think you should bill your customers at the same time every month and the process takes 4-6 hours. When the day comes to bill customers, you just don’t have that time in your schedule.
Consider hiring a part-time billing clerk to do customer billing.
Stagger the billing during the month and bill subsets of your customers weekly or twice a month. For example, bill ¼ of your customers each week.
Break the task down into smaller parts. If you bill customers at the end of the month, schedule time to work on it in the last week of the month, one hour at a time.
Problem - You only did a couple of hours of work and think the amount is too small to bill to your customer, so you hold the billing until you do more work.
Reconsider this policy and bill your customer every month, at a minimum.
Realize if you have several of these situations going on at once, it could add up to a significant amount.
Realize it’s always worth your time to get your money.
Problem - You have already billed the customer for the job when she then asks you to do “just one more thing.” You know the extra request is outside the quoted job scope, but you’re too scared to ask to be compensated.
Remind yourself of the value of your work and your time. If you don’t respect yourself, your customers won’t either.
When you bill for the previously completed project, put a statement in your billing that all work is completed and any additional requests will be billed.
Thank the customer for his business, be enthusiastic about the the request and without hesitation, let the customer know of the price for the additional work.
Problem - You hate paperwork. You’d rather just be out in the field doing what you love.
Delegate the billing to an employee
Come back down to reality and understand you are a business owner, not an employee. And as a business owner, you wear many hats and have many roles. Doing some things you don’t like is the price of owning your business and calling the shots.
Find an online billing service, such as FreshBooks, and automate as much of the billing process as possible.
Problem - You don’t know why you put off billing customers.
There’s something emotional going on, so talk to a trusted friend about it or get therapy. You cannot sustain a business with sporadic customer billing.
Ask a mentor or friend to hold you accountable for your customer billing and talk to them about the situation.
Just do it. Read through all the solutions in this blog post and put a system into place.
*Credit to Grant Cardone for this phrase.