You have completed the job and have cleaned up the area and are ready to leave. You let your client know that you’ll send them through the invoice when you get back to the office but on the way to the office, you receive an emergency call and head off to the job - delaying the invoice until the following day.
This is a frequent scenario for a lot of tradies. You have the best intentions to issue your invoice immediately from the office but life/business happens.
The problem with the scenario is that the 24 hour delay or even 48 hour delay in issuing your invoice, two things could be happening:
Your client receives a bill in the mail or something unexpected occurs in the time it takes you to send the invoice. Now, they’re considering if they actually needed the work you did in the first place. Questions are being asked, concerns are being raised about your invoice, it becomes a nightmare situation.
Your client receives the invoice 24 or 48 hours after you explicitly explained that they would receive the invoice that afternoon. Their mind is elsewhere when they eventually receive the invoice and say “i’ll get to that later”.
You have hundreds of dollars outstanding in materials, and you begin to sweat about receiving the payment. It’s been a week since you issued the invoice. You make a couple of phone calls but you haven’t been able to connect with your client. You’re stressing and nervous about being paid.
After all the hard work is completed and you’ve solved your clients problem, invoicing and collecting payment should be the next step.
With all the available technology across phones and ipads, there are very few reasons to leave a completed job without invoicing and collecting payment immediately. In comparison it’s like ordering a pizza from the local pizzeria and receiving the invoice 2 days later. It just doesn’t happen.
Which makes it extremely important to invoice and collect payment at the end of each job.
Cashflow could be compared to being the oxygen for your business, without steady cashflow, it will feel like your business is suffocating.
Materials that you’ve purchased for the job, the labour to be on site (yourself or your tradespeople), these all add up, and if you don’t receive payment in the appropriate timeframe, then you’re looking at your debts growing steadily each day.
Peace of mind is important, the last thing you want to be doing at the end of each week or month is checking if all your invoices have been sent to clients and realising that you’ve missed on hundreds, if not thousands of dollars in invoices.
If you’re quoting onsite, you should be invoicing onsite!
Debt collection is an extremely time consuming process that saps energy. It is not an enjoyable position to be in. If you are chasing payments from your clients, the only outcome that you care about is being paid. If your clients test you enough, there is a chance that you’ll reduce the cost of the invoice just to get paid enough to cover your costs.
FlatRateNOW offers a consolidated platform to create invoices quickly , efficiently and integrated with other applications such as accounting software. FRN now allows your invoices to seamlessly integrate with your accounting software. This is an easy process if your invoices have already been generated and you’re expecting payment to hit your account from your payment terminal at any moment.
Once the invoices are uploaded into your accounting software, you can quickly reconcile the payments and be completely confident that your invoices have been paid. This will reduce the stress involved in handling delayed payments or invoices that haven’t been sent!
To maximise your time and reduce the energy spent double handling invoices into your Accounting Software, FlatRateNOW integrates with Xero.
In as simple as 3 clicks, your invoices can be uploaded into Xero, ready to be reconciled and closed.