By Kunle Omojola
This post is sponsored by Mailform.io, helping small and medium sized businesses automate invoicing and get paid faster via snail mail.
Past due invoices kill your cash flow. As a small business, invoice payment terms are essentially a form of financing (a really short term loan) for your customers. When customers are late, or simply don’t pay, they’re essentially defaulting on your loan to them, putting you out of pocket. According to a study by U.S. Bank, 82 percent of small businesses fail due to poor cash flow management. The average small business has $84,000 in unpaid invoices, with 81% of them being more than 30 days past due.
Automation Leads the Way
Most businesses these days use a service like Quickbooks or Xero to manage invoices and get paid. Most invoice services rely on email to send invoices via email. This has been a massive boon – it’s reduced the cost of getting invoices to customers, and reduced the amount of time small business owners and accounts receivables employees spend thinking about invoices.
This improvement has come with it’s own trade-offs. In particular, many invoice emails get dropped into spam or junk mail, and customers never see it. These invoices go unpaid for days, weeks and months, due to no malice by the customer. They simply didn’t see it, and moved on with their lives.
Mailform Automates Past Due Invoices
Mailform automatically imports, prints and mails invoices to the right customers. The advantages of this are significant. In particular, it gives a small business the ability to ensure, with a really high degree of confidence, that a customer has seen the outstanding invoice. By sending invoices via USPS First Class Mail with a return slip, you can know around when your invoice was delivered. By sending your invoices via USPS Certified Mail, you get a tracking number and delivery confirmation when your invoice(s) were delivered. In all cases with Mailform, you’re guaranteed to skip the spam or junk mail box, and you increase the likelihood that your invoice was seen by the right person.
The Results Speak for Themselves
When we launched Mailform’s Quickbooks Online integration, customers led the way — they used it to import, print and mail their backlog of past due invoices to their clients, or to send late notices. To date, the results have been incredible. In just a few short months:
- Thousands of invoices have been mailed via Mailform.
- Those invoices have been worth millions in value.
- **52% of the invoices sent* were subsequently paid.
- For every dollar spent on Mailform, *$285 in invoices were paid back.* That is an ROI of almost 300%!
In the months since we learned this, we’ve extended this functionality with add-ons into several accounting and invoice management services, including:
This holiday season, Mailform is your trusted partner for printing and mailing past due invoices. What better way to end the year, than to make sure all your 2017 customers with past due invoices know that their payments are outstanding?
If you need a hand getting started, here’s a quick demo video on how Mailform’s Quickbooks add-on works:
If you have questions, comments or suggestions, please email team@mailform.io!
