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Eliminate Late Payments with Instant Invoices and Quick Pay

Project 2 Payment Instant Invoice Feature

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Almost 3 in every 4 businesses experience late payments, according to a survey by Intuit QuickBooks. Late payments cause cash-flow problems that make it harder for home service businesses to manage day-to-day operations, pay their suppliers and pay their staff. And that’s not mentioning how late payments take a lot of time and energy, and that they create many sleepless nights waiting for the payment to come in.

Late Payment Causes

Late payment causes are broken down into two main culprits: manual invoicing and lack of payment options.

Manual Invoicing

Manual invoicing hurts your business in three ways:

  1. Time – Manual invoicing takes a lot of time, not only to create the invoice and ensure it is correct, but also to follow up on payments. If your invoicing process is manual and you only accept cash or check, these are perfect excuses for a customer not to pay on time because most don’t have cash on hand and these days, banks don’t hand out checkbooks like they used to.
  2. Clogged cash flow – If your payments are not steadily coming in, your business’s cash flow becomes stagnant. This could mean that you are unable to buy materials or supplies for the next job or that you must take out of your personal account to keep the business running.
  3. Customers lose track of invoices – Let’s face it: paper invoices are easy to lose, and cash payments can be harder to track. Make it easier for your customer by providing digital invoices via email and giving your customers an easy way to pay online. It’s also easier and faster to track invoices and payments online than on paper.

Lack of Payment Options

Restricting customer payment methods makes it harder for customers to pay you. While many businesses want to avoid paying credit card processing fees, today’s golden standard in business, especially post-COVID, is to give your customers the ability to pay with cards.

Many people do not carry cash or have cash readily available. In the minds of your customers, cards are easy to use, easy to manage, and less germy because they know where their card has been. It’s not so easy to say where the cash has been.

If your business is accepting paper checks, keep in mind that most banks don’t even provide checkbooks when someone opens a checking account. It might sound crazy if you’ve been running your business for a while, but most people prefer to use their debit card because they are easy to use and easy to manage, and it feels a little more secure than having your bank account and routing number out in the open.

As great as cash and paper checks appear to be, another obstacle for your business is that you need to deposit them in the bank. Even if you take a picture of the check to deposit through your bank’s app, you still have that check in front of you with all of your customers’ personal information and banking information, which is a security risk!

Read: How to Keep Track of Invoices and Payments

Late Payment Remedy: Project 2 Payment

It’s time to take control of late payments, and two tools from Project 2 Payment make it very easy to avoid late customer payments. Our Instant Invoice tool quickly sends itemized invoices and collects payment without needing to create an estimate first. The Quick Pay tool is also known as Take Payment and is the fastest way for you to process a payment on behalf of those customers who use a saved payment method.

Instant Invoice

By selecting the “Instant Invoice” button within the Project 2 Payment Invoice module or directly from a Customer Record, you can send an invoice to a customer without having to create an estimate first. After selecting “Instant Invoice,” you get the option to add invoice line items and process payment using the customer’s saved payment methods or by emailing a payment link to the customer. This lightning-fast workflow is particularly handy for business owners looking to complete emergency fixes, maintenance projects, or repeat jobs that don’t often require pre-approval.  

“It’s all about creating time-saving efficiencies. Some of the contractors we serve don’t need to create estimates within their payment workflow; they simply want the fastest way to notify customers of completed work and get paid for their time and resources. We’re here to make that possible.” – Taylor Lund, Director of Product Management 

Quick Pay (Take a Payment)

Project 2 Payment users can simply click on the $ icon next to any Customer Record to pre-fill the customer’s payment method details in the Take Payment module for on-the-fly payment acceptance. No more waiting and driving around to pick up checks; payment acceptance really is as easy as clicking a button. 

“Payments don’t need to be complicated, but they do need to be accurate and timely. With the release of the Instant Invoices and Quick Pay features, contractors have everything they need to make payments easy and improve cash flow so they can focus on the real work at hand.” – Vince Arnoldi, President 

Now is the time to eliminate late payments and uncomplicate your payment process. Take back your time and energy to spend on things that really matter, like growing your business. Project 2 Payment is here to help you automate your processes and simplify your life!

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