Nearly 90% of businesses are regularly paid late. This clearly signals a crucial need to revamp collection efforts.
This prevalent issue of late payments is not just a minor inconvenience; it threatens your business’s existence. At least half of all businesses spend four hours or more weekly on accounts receivable tasks like sending out customer payment reminders. Every minute spent chasing late payments is precious time that could be invested in more strategic activities.
This doesn’t mean that all businesses are doomed to suffer late payments from the majority of their customers forever. In fact, the Chaser late payment report found that teams who follow up on customer invoices were much more likely to get paid promptly. Even more promising, customers with AR automation in play were three times more likely to get paid early.
If you’re looking for tips to improve your collections, get paid faster, and on time, then this blog is just for you. Keep reading to learn the ins and outs of Autopay: including, what it is, how it works, along with benefits and best practices to simplify and automate your receivables management. By the end of this article, you’ll understand how to harness the power of AR software to streamline collections and free up valuable resources.
What is Autopay? Autopay Definition and Overview
Autopay allows your customers to save their payment information and set up automatic payments. It minimizes your work required for collections, helps your team get paid on time and spares you the effort of relentlessly chasing your customers to settle up their late payments. Autopay is also a huge win for your clients. It simplifies their accounts payables and ensures they don’t rack up any pesky late payment fees.
The Relationship Between Autopay and AR Automation
Accounts Receivable (AR) automation and Autopay work together to streamline the process of collecting payments. AR automation handles the heavy lifting of invoicing and tracking payments, automating these processes to save time and reduce errors. Meanwhile Autopay is a feature often enabled by AR automation systems that allows customers to set up automatic payments for their invoices. This ensures that payments are made on time without the need for manual intervention.
Essentially, AR automation sets the stage for a more efficient billing process, while Autopay ensures that the execution of payments aligns seamlessly with this setup, creating a smoother financial operation overall.
The Real Cost of Traditional Collections
We previously mentioned that 90% of businesses are regularly paid late. While late payments are annoying, their impact runs deep and can ultimately jeopardize your business. In the following section, we’ll explore how late payments affect firms.
Downstream Effects of Late Payments
- Limited Working Capital: Late payments can easily escalate into bad debts, putting your business on a slippery slope to long-term financial health issues.
- Cash Flow Uncertainty: Even when your customers eventually settle their late payments, it’s impossible to predict when and how. This ambiguity hinders any reliable future growth planning.
- Reduced Efficiency: It wastes a lot of time when your team has to repeatedly call multiple customers to track down their payment. These efforts are important but diverts your team’s time and energy away from other impactful strategic work to routine, mundane tasks.
- A Poor Customer (and Employee) Experience: Customers don’t want to be hounded via email and phone calls - they’ve got enough on their plate as is. The same goes for your internal team – they don’t want to spend their days copy and pasting the same late payment email copy over and over.
5 Major Benefits of Autopay
As we’ve covered above, finance teams with a manual collections strategy often struggle with late payments, along with cash flow issues, poor customer experience, and efficiency gaps. Thankfully, autopay is an easy resource to get your collections efforts back on track.
In fact autopay helps finance teams in numerous areas, including:
- Cash Flow Forecasting: Autopay is like a beacon that pierces through the fog, providing clear and reliable cash flow forecasting.
- Efficiency: Liberate your teams from the Groundhog Day of collection tasks, opening a new chapter of strategic focus and productivity.
- Cash Management: Activate autopay, and watch as the once formidable risk of late payments and bad debts retreats into oblivion.
- Customer Satisfaction: Autopay remembers so that your customers don’t have to, ensuring they are never nudged about payment statuses again.
- Competitive Edge: Adopting autopay isn't just about keeping pace—it's about setting the pace in a rapidly evolving digital business landscape.
Introducing Centime's Autopay Functionality
At the heart of Centime’s autopay lies a dedication to enhance and streamline every aspect of AR operations. It is a testament to our relentless pursuit to empower clients with tools that not only optimize payment processes but also fuel collection automation and enhance the customer experience. Autopay isn’t merely a cog in the machine; it’s the engine driving the entire payment lifecycle towards efficiency and precision.
With a keen understanding that each business has unique needs, Centime’s autopay is engineered to be adaptable and user-friendly. The roll-out is as effortless as it is transformative, equipping teams with a tool that instantly elevates their collections strategy from reactive to proactive.
Autopay Best Practices
Maximizing autopay adoption among your clients doesn't have to be a steep climb. Think of it as a friendly conversation over coffee, where you're guiding them towards a tool that makes life easier for everyone. Here's how to ensure your clients are eager to jump on board with autopay:
1. Illustrate the Value
Start by painting a picture of a world without late payments or chasing invoices. Show your clients how autopay can bring peace of mind by smoothing out their cash flow and cutting down on administrative tasks.
2. Make It Simple
Nobody likes complicated processes. Ensure your autopay system is as straightforward as using a favorite app. A few taps or clicks should be all it takes to get things rolling.
For example, Centime allows you to invite your customers to enroll in autopay directly from email - no login required. This simple sign up process can help maximize autopay enrollment.
3. Provide a Clear Roadmap
Lay out the steps to adoption in a clear, easy-to-follow guide. Think of it as providing GPS navigation through the setup process, so your customers can avoid wrong turns or confusing directions.
By following these best practices with a friendly, clear, and supportive voice, you'll set the stage for maximum autopay adoption amongst your clients.
Streamline Receivables Management with Centime’s Autopay
Centime boasts one of the most adaptable and user-friendly Autopay functionalities on the market. Centime’s Autopay simplifies collections, turning what used to be a reactive task into a proactive strategy, so you can focus more on growing your business and less on chasing payments.
Conclusion
As we wrap up our exploration of Autopay's capabilities, it's evident that adopting this tool is more than just a modern convenience—it's a strategic necessity for businesses looking to thrive.
Autopay not only tackles the prevalent problem of late payments but also brings a multitude of benefits that can transform the financial health of a company.
From streamlining cash flow to enhancing customer satisfaction and providing a competitive edge, Autopay stands out as a vital component of effective accounts receivable management.
With the clear, step-by-step best practices provided for adopting Autopay, we hope this blog has equipped you with the information you need to implement this new technology into your receivables strategy.
Want to learn more about AR automation and autopay? Try out Centime for free.
