Get Shift Done: Tips and Tricks
Most of us have had at least one client who never seems to pay their invoices on time. But don’t worry, FreshBooks has your back. The popular accounting solution vendor has volunteered itself to be the scapegoat for late payment reminders, shifting any annoyance your client might have to an automated message — one they’ll start to expect if they don’t make their payments on time.
Best of all, it couldn’t be easier to set up. Simply log into your FreshBooks account, navigate to “Settings:”
and find the tab marked “Emails:”
There’s a bunch of other great email templates and automated features we’ll tackle in later posts, but for now we’ll focus on the “Late Payment Reminders” link:
From here, you have the option to configure up to three automated reminders for unpaid invoices, with custom text for each. Check out my example below:
This invoice is tailored for an imaginary client whose contract gives them 30 days to make payment on an invoice. Because their invoice is only slightly overdue, I’ve given them a gentle reminder that includes the amount they owe and a link to the invoice. After all, I want to make it as easy as possible for them to pay me!
Depending on your relationship to the client, you could also send a reminder a few days before payment is due — in this case, I would set the “Send this reminder x days after the invoice date” field to 27.
But what happens if a friendly reminder isn’t enough? That’s where the other two custom reminders come in handy. Again, remember your client will be getting this message from a third-party software, so feel free to be a little more — ahem — insistent, if you will. As long as your contract permits it and you’ve discussed it with your client, interest fees for very late payments can be a great incentive for your clients to get those payments to you sooner next time.
So there you have it — in less than five minutes, you can get a robot to do your dirty work while you get money sooner and maintain your awesome working relationship with the client. Everybody wins! (Except the robot, but we haven’t heard him complain yet.)
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