Effective Late Payment Reminder Letter for Businesses

Late payment reminder letter for businesses

hey there fresh Nooks users this video is to show you a way that you can let fresh books help you collect on the invoices that you send if you've got clients that are late to pay so unpaid invoices are super confusing and stressful right and you hopefully have a good relationship with these clients and so you're like how do I bring this up I think they have money but why are they paying me how can they ask politely we we people we humans we're business owners we can ask ourselves all sorts of things talk ourselves into all sorts of reasons why so this feature here in freshbooks can help relieve some of that it just sends it for you you set it whenever you're thinking clear-headed when the relationship is at the very beginning and you've agreed to things you set it up at the beginning so you don't overthink it and stress about it at the end whenever it is late to be paid you can kind of think of it as letting fresh books do your dirty work for you when it comes to your receivables and invoicings so let's dive in and I'll show you some tricks [Music] all right so I got my screen zoomed in here a little bit so folks can hopefully see I'm on the invoices section of the dashboard and we're going to create a new invoice and this is for a client that we think it might be slow to pay we're going to add a client this is important you have to do this first we got our demo guy testy MC testerson and as soon as I did that I got several more Fields down here on the right when I didn't have a client none of this was here so what do we need to do send reminders so drill down into the Chevron if you click this check box it says automatically send payments reminders to client you can do three days after due date and you can change any of this you can do multiple reminders one two if you click here on the little dots and lines you get the chance to add a message this particular feature of adding this or personalized message might only be for the folks on premium or select this editable part might not be for plus I'm not 100 sure time in below if you do know though because basically the premium feature is what allows you to update emails so I'm here back in the dashboard I went to the gear icon and to email and templates and these email templates are editable so I know that this feature is only allowed in Plus or select but you can change the wording of your late payment reminders here if you want to write something different if you're nervous about it and you don't know what to say and you're lay in bed at night and you're thinking about how can I have this conversation with this client then just go with freshbooks suggested text it's not going to be bad it's going to be fine and it'll take a lot of that stress off of you all right so back here yes we've set up our reminders we changed our language if we wanted to and we put done another quick thing I want to point out is this Chevron down here now talk about Dirty Work This is a feature that allows you to charge late fees to your clients if they're slow to pay look here we're going to check this box here automatically add late fees you can change it to percentage or a flat fee you can set the date of when the invoice will automatically add that late fee for you click done so right now we have a reminder set for 3 15 and 30 days and we're charging 10 percent after 30 days I'll use this as a moment to talk quickly about freshbooks payments and online payments so one of the reasons that I think a business could be reluctant to use this feature about sending those reminders or applying late fees is if you aren't always fast to mark your invoices as paid so if you use freshbooks payments which this demo company has set up where someone can pay an invoice via a credit card there's also ACH there's stripe there's PayPal I have videos about freshbooks payments ask me if you have questions about freshbooks payments but if you use freshbooks payments and the client pays with the button inside the invoice it's going to be already Marcus pain if you don't use freshbooks payments and they pay you another way perhaps you have stripe but it's not connected or something like that or just any other payment processor but you didn't go into freshbooks and mark the invoices paid then you might get egg on your face and it's going to send a reminder that they shouldn't have said because you didn't take the time to Market from overdue to paid I want to talk about one more thing that might be able to help you come here to clients and I drilled down into testimate testerson and I've come down here across these lines that came to contacts so the reason this video is being made is because someone asked about this in my office hours this week he said he's like yeah I got one client and they're just notoriously late to pay and so we discussed well whose job is it to pay apparently this company has a CFO who pays the bills but he works most closely with the CEO and so I suggest Addie the CEO as a contact here so if you press this green button it's kind of hidden that you can actually have multiple email addresses that your invoices go to this is how you get multiple email addresses to receive your invoices and you would add first name last name and the other person's email so when you're ready to send your invoice and you go to send to you would be able to have this drop down and instead of just testing mctesterson at gmail you'll have testy's boss also and there would be a second item here a second drop down that you can put here in this CC line and that means both of those email addresses are going to get that late notice reminder that the invoice has not been paid on time and maybe that will help the person in the office whether it's a CFO or an administrative assistant or an accounts payable department something like that it'll help them do their job better because they need to be paying on time and now their boss knows that they're not paying on time all right so what did we learn you can use freshbooks to send automatic late notice reminders you can use freshbooks to add a late charge a late payment charge to your invoices automatically you can use freshbooks to accept payments so when they pay via the freshbooks invoice because the link in the invoice is like a hot active link that is going to allow them to pay the credit card or ACH or striper PayPal or whatever you have set up it's going to mark that paid once the client has paid and we learned about how you can add additional email addresses to send an invoice to which might be beneficial if you have a person in the office that you're dealing with that's late on paying the invoices and the client maybe isn't getting that notice the client isn't seeing that these invoices are being paid late by the staff all right I hope this was helpful again this was something that came up last week in office hours I helped the gentleman who had asked this question and I thought I need to tell other people about it so I hope that this was helpful for you if you're interested in joining the office hours we learn fresh books in and out and it's a chance for you to sit every week get your bookkeeping done you'll never be behind and when you have a question you have an expert to lean on I'm Kate Josephine Johnson and I help businesses build their business Legacy [Music]