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Outstanding payment mail for Public Relations

hi this is tim yoder with fit small business and today i want to help you navigate some of the difficulties in asking a customer for payment by email there is an accompanying article for this video at fitsmallbusiness.com reminders i'll throw a link to that in the description below and here you can get some free professional email templates for asking for payments so the first reason you might need to ask for a payment is for an upfront deposit so this is very common especially for larger jobs where you'll have to purchase materials up front companies often ask for a 20 to 50 percent upfront deposit to help pay for those costs of the materials before you send an email asking for payment of an upfront deposit make sure that your customer is expecting it this email should not be the first time the customer's hearing about this deposit it should already be agreed upon the customer should not be surprised when they receive it so you're going to want to send this email as soon as you agree to an estimate or quote with your customer so don't delay when the customer accepts your estimate or bid immediately send off this email request for payment of the deposit and oftentimes contractors that are collecting deposits will not allow them to be on the start date won't give the customer a start date until they've received this deposit and so you might communicate that in the email as well you might tell them we have a tentative start date but the start date is not official until you pay your deposit contents of this email you don't want to just send an email saying please pay me x amount of dollars explain to them how you come to this amount so the total cost of the job and then the required deposit amount probably also has both a dollar amount as an and a percentage amount um when does that deposit due and also again specify that if you need this deposit before adding them uh to your to your job list or before giving them a projected start date make sure you communicate that i'd also let them know when the remaining balance is going to be due you may not have an official date yet but you could say something like you know within 30 days of project completion or within 10 days of project completion and again with any form of payment you're going to want to tell them what are the acceptable payments so what are you exactly are you expecting them to do is there a link to click in the email to pay by credit card should they mail you a check particu to a particular address how exactly do you want them to submit payment obviously some contact information in case i have questions for you and then it's a good idea to attach a copy of the invoice okay so you've got your deposit you've done the work it's all complete now now you need the balance due from the customer so you want to send them another email for this and this has to this email should be extremely quick so within one to two days the customer the project's done the customer's happy i recommend you check with the customer make sure the customer is happy uh before you send this email and invoice but as soon as that customer is satisfied get that invoice out the door don't wait for a month don't wait for them to have second thoughts for them to find minor little defects get the invoice out very quickly i recommend within one to two days contents of this email obviously the amount due when is it due again acceptable payments so do you want them to write you a check and send it to an address do you want them to make an ach deposit do you want to make them have do you want them to pay by credit card so make it very very clear to them exactly how they can pay now probably the more difficult so those first two emails are very easy to send the customers happy you're going to start work on the job you've completed the job they should be expecting the emails all very easy well now we're getting to a little bit more difficult situation where you're having to ask for something that is past due obviously you want to keep this very professional and these first few emails that you're sending don't even really think of them as being collection emails these are just friendly reminders you know perhaps your bill got lost maybe you have a bad email address so these are just friendly reminders to pay your bill you're not really getting into the difficult collection process at this point so contents of the email again like always the amount due the due date what are the acceptable payments how do you want them to send that payment contact information you also want to address that if this is the first email you're sending say you know you should have already received your invoice it is now overdue i'm sending you this email to remind you if this is the second or third email then you need to tell them that like this is our second our third attempt at contacting you since this debt has been overdue and attach a copy of the original invoice now this is one place that quickbooks online can actually be really really handy so as you can see here in this screenshot you can actually automate three reminder emails for each invoice and you can specify exactly what you want the reminder to say it'll attach an invoice for you and you can say you can tell quickbooks exactly when you want the reminder email sent how many days after the due date um so just very quickly i want to show you where you can go to set these options and then we'll get back to how you word your emails great okay so we're at our dashboard here in quickbooks online to set these email options we just go to our cogwheel then we're going to go to our account settings then we're going to go to our sales settings and then scroll down and you want to go to this reminder section so if you click anywhere in this section it'll open it up and you need to make sure you have the automatic invoice reminders turned on there i turned them off now we're going to turn them on you can see here that we're set up to send two reminders one the day before the due date and five days after the due date if you click on here again you can actually determine the exact wording okay so this is just the first reminder and this is actually sent before the due date so you'd want to word this as something as you know we haven't received payments your due date is approaching something like that you can send a second reminder and then you can actually even save send a third reminder so very very handy feature in quickbooks online if you don't have a copy of quickbooks online i will throw a link in the description so that you can click over and subscribe so what happens if you're sending these emails for past due balances and you don't get a response first thing you need to do is give them a call give them the benefit of the doubt be polite one of the main reasons people won't pay especially for your service industry is they're not happy with the service you provided and so you need to find that out and a telephone call is the best way sometimes they may respond to your email with their issues and sometimes they may not so give them a call if they have an issue with the service get them in touch with the people that can take care of that oftentimes the person collecting the debt is not the same person that might understand the service that was provided and solutions to offer the client so make sure that they can get in touch with the person that can help satisfy their needs so that then they're willing to pay what if they simply can't pay this is fairly unusual in my experience most customers are not going to incur the service unless they can pay for it unfortunately that's obviously not always true but generally most the time it's either they're not paying because they're not satisfied with the service or they're simply very unorganized and they have lost the invoice but if they can't pay you might offer them a payment plan other things you might do is even if you don't normally accept credit cards perhaps you can accept a credit card for their payment even though that might cost you a three percent or you could pass that credit card uh cost on to the client um in their invoice but perhaps offer them a either payment plan or an alternative way to pay so what happens if you've gone through a series of three emails you've called them no response they're still not paying well unfortunately at this point i think you're going to have to go into a more formal collection process which is going to involve a series of four written collection letters sent via old-fashioned snail mail so that you can document all of your communications with the customers so we do have a another video and another article on these four collection letter templates so here's the address uh in the video i'll also throw this down in the description below so once you get through the email process if you're still having troubles please visit our our collection letter templates and video for some more suggestions so again my name is tim yoder with fit small business and i hope this video was useful