How do you cut your costs, get the money you are due and manage all the headaches at the same time? Here are some ideas that might reduce the noise a bit:

1. Plastic, not paper. Dealing with cash or checks costs more than you might think. You have to handle it, count it, move it from your drawer to the bank, all with human hands, and it takes time. Businesses which handle cash also pay higher insurance premiums. Much of the same logic applies to handling paper checks.
2. People are using their credit cards more and more. Despite the fees, accepting plastic or checks electronically cuts out all the costs and many of the errors of humans handling paper money.
3. Electronic invoicing has become commonplace, and online payment is building steam. These things started slowly but have been steadily gaining ground. More companies offer electronic invoicing and the convenience of it all has tremendous appeal.
4. Using electronic payment eliminates all the time normally spent in real-world transport of that cash, which means you get paid faster.

Online invoicing and payment centers are ultimately more convenient for today’s well-connected people. We’re busy, always on the go. We want to see it, pay it and get it over with in a moment with the least amount of bleeding possible. If you’re going to go that route, follow that strategy as far as you can.

One thing common in online invoicing is an overabundance of images and advertisements. There are several things wrong with that approach. If it looks like spam, they’ll push it over to their spam bucket and it will never be read. Their email client will then start recognizing your invoices as spam, and they will never see an invoice again. Even if they know it’s a bill, why would they want to wade through all the junk to get to the bottom line? Finally, why pay somebody to jazz up an invoice when really all you want to do is get your money? Keep the advertisements separate. It doesn’t cost extra to send two emails instead of just one. Just put a simple link to your website at the bottom and you’ll be covered.

Your invoice should look like an invoice and have as few extraneous details as possible. The only graphic additions should be there to validate the origin of the message or clarify the content. The entire message should be designed for exactly one purpose: Let the customer pay the bill as simply and quickly as possible. No fuss.

Your online customer portal should be the same: They should see the current balance with a “pay now” button as soon as they log in. They should be able to easily see their billing and payment history. They should be able to dispute all or part of the bill, and add notes and see notes for each invoice.
While they’re paying though, it won’t hurt to add in a check box for “Make this payment automatically” or “Send me offers for programs that may help me.”

It’s important to remember that someone else’s lack of planning is not always your emergency.  Even if their situation really is dire, and even if it directly impact’s you, your best course of action may be to put that item down as “next” on your list, rather than dropping everything to deal with this new issue.

It takes a significant amount of time to switch your brain to a new context. See Umich study. Every time you change tasks, you leave your prior task in an unfinished state, figure out what has to happen with the new task and then get started on that.  If new tasks keep landing in your lap sooner than you can get the old one done, you have to switch contexts more than once per task.  If your tasks change often enough that the context switching takes longer than the time spent doing your task, you are thrashing.

The longer you spend working productively on any task, the more effective you become.  When you switch from one task to another before the first is done, you have to add the time it takes to familiarize yourself with the new project to the time it takes to finish both tasks.

We each have several lists of things which needs to be done.  We have a long list of things which need to be done some time when you get a chance, like a vacation in a far-off place.  This is the sort of thing you dream about, plan for and then some day you go.  We also have a list of things which need to be done by a certain time.  Sometimes this list gets so long you miss deadlines.  The critical list is your short list.  This is a small number of things you want to finish today.  Sometimes your short list never gets hit because somebody else’s emergency bumped you off of it, and you are working on their list.

If you can manage your short list of things to do, then you can minimize the number of times you need to switch contexts, and by doing so you get more done.  When someone contacts you with a task, you need to evaluate that event against your own priorities.  If the event is a true emergency, there is nothing wrong with dropping what you are doing in order to help.  However, if it can wait long enough for you to finish what you are doing, you can more effectively finish your list of tasks.  Better yet, if you can place it further down on your list you can maybe get through your short list on time, saving the new thing for a new day.