Payment Portals and Electronic Invoicing
In their simplest form, Payment Portals are a way for customers to pay their bills without the need to print and mail a check. Combined with Electronic Invoicing, they can be a very powerful technology for both suppliers and their customers:
Customers can not only pay their bills online, but also [...]
The Automated Clearing House network (ACH) provides an extremely reliable and effective system to transfer funds electronically from one financial institution to another. This includes recurring billing, pre-authorized debits, internet / telephone payments and checks converted into ACH payments. It is estimated that the number of items paid through the ACH network will continue to double [...]
Measuring your efforts
In an earlier post I talked about calculating your DSO. The most well know way to benchmark your A/R is by using the Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) calculation. It’s a common, well understood indicator that is widely used. The fact that it is so common makes it easy to find DSO numbers for [...]
DSO stands for Days Sales Outstanding
It is a commonly used measure for the invoicing collection process. Investopedia defines DSO as “A measure of the average number of days that a company takes to collect revenue after a sale has been made”. If you are strictly a cash business your DSO will be 0. If you [...]
Now that your customer has been invoiced for your services or products the next step is to have them provide payment. That is the name of the game and this is the hard part. Although your customers are honest and trustworthy, getting them to pay sometimes can be a chore, and the easier it is, [...]
What is a lockbox?
A service offered by banks to companies in which the company receives payments by mail to a post office box and the bank picks up the payments several times a day, deposits them into the company’s account, and notifies the company of the deposit. Data entry clerks at the bank manually [...]
When it comes to business invoices can be your best friend, but also your worst enemy. In an ideal world, invoices would get generated for services or products your company has provided and the customers would pay them. Sounds simple, right? The reality is there is a large amount of time, effort and ultimately money, [...]
Why are we having a tasty Turkey Dinner only once a year, on Thanksgiving? For the same reason why we run yearly reports once a year, at the end of the year. They have too much complexity, it takes too much time to prepare them and then to consume and analyze. We don’t need such [...]
