Is it possible to avoid late payments entirely? 

Late payments slow down everything a business wants to achieve. They mean a lack of available cash to invest back into growing, too. Late payments are always something a business might contend with, too. Therefore, managing, and minimising, late payments as well as possible is every business’s responsibility. Of course, the ideal scenario is not having to chase your invoices at all. While you’re not guaranteed that outcome every time, and there are a few ways to ensure you do as little chasing as possible:

• Are you invoicing promptly? If you don’t show any urgency around getting paid, how can you expect urgency from your clients? The best way to encourage prompt payment is to invoice quickly.
• Are your terms as clear as possible? Sometimes a late payment is due to something simple like forgetting to pay or not being clear on when payment is due. Make sure the due date is clear and remove as much uncertainty as possible.
• Are you consistent in your communications? If your communications with your clients are a bit more haphazard, try setting up a reminder system to support your customers in paying on time. With Satago, this is easy to do.
• If you can, insist on payment before doing the work. Alternatively, you might be able to agree 50% payment upfront with 50% after the work is completed.

There are several ways Satago can help you get paid more quickly and reduce the time you spend chasing payments.

Easily set up a Credit Control process to take the pressure off you

Don’t rely on yourself or another person to remember to send credit control emails and keep your accounts receivable in check.

Instead, automate as much as you can, such as sending invoices and payment reminder emails. Use your accounting tool to invoice promptly and make the most of the option to send repeated invoices when you need to.

Satago can set up an easily customisable invoice reminder workflow with emails going out at set intervals. You can send:

• Reminders before payment is due.
• “Thank you for early payment” emails.
• Late payment fees reminders.
• Grouped invoice reminders (instead of sending separate email reminders).

These emails can be customised to use different language for different clients or as unpaid invoices are more overdue, and to make sure they sound like they’re coming from your business. You can also customise the sending schedule to suit your needs, or to send certain clients more emails and others fewer.

We’ve also made it very easy to charge late payment interest. Usually, you’d need to manually calculate the interest on a daily basis and then multiply it by how many days your payment is late. With Satago, we can calculate this for you automatically, so it can be added to late invoices with overdue payments.

As an added courtesy to your clients, make sure to mention on your invoice reminders that late payment interest applies after a certain amount of time, so they have prior warning.

Read more: Debtor Days Calculator: How to Reduce the Time it Takes to Get Paid

Quickly learn how creditworthy your customers are with risk reports

It’s a good idea to credit check new customers to have an idea of the business relationship you’re getting into and to make sure the credit limit is appropriate for them.

Satago’s risk insights make this easy, allowing you to run credit checks on both prospective and existing customers. Being able to easily see which potential customers are high risk and therefore likely to pay late means you can adjust your credit terms and approach to credit control accordingly.

You can also regularly review the Analysis dashboard in the Risk Insights section to check where your credit control system might need a tweak. It shows:  

• Aged debtors: How overdue your invoices are in increments of 30 days, with a downloadable CSV or PDF report showing a breakdown of customers and how overdue they are, hyperlinked so you can easily navigate the system and send reminder emails or set yourself a reminder to call or follow up with them at a particular time. 

• Risk segments: How many customers fit into which risk band. 
• Risk concentration: This combines aged debtors and risk segments, so you could look at how many very high risk customers have invoices 90+ days overdue for example. 
• Largest and oldest open invoices.  
• Customer credit summary: How many customers fit into each risk band. 
• Top industry segment concentrations: This shows which clients are in which sector.  

• Highest risk active customers.   

Having this information available to you allows you to make data-backed decisions about what to prioritise and which clients might need additional contact, in turn making your credit control process even more efficient.  

Cover cash flow gaps with invoice financing

If you have long debtor days and you want to get paid sooner, it might make sense to get started with invoice financing. With invoice finance, you can get a cash injection in a matter of days rather than waiting weeks. You can use this financing to fund new projects, buy equipment or tools, expand the team or cover any cash flow gaps.

At Satago, we take a slightly different approach to invoice financing than many companies:

• No hidden fees: We’ve done away with the hidden fees that invoice financing has a reputation for, and our pricing is clear and transparent. You’ll know up front what you’re paying and that’s made up of an arrangement fee, a monthly service fee, and an interest fee.
• Get started with single invoice finance: If you don’t want to finance all invoices you don’t have to, as Satago offers both single (or selective) and full invoice financing. We’re one of a handful of providers in the UK who offer both and we also make it easy for you to switch between the two options.
• Credit control, invoice finance and risk insights in one tool: Most financing tools help with either invoice financing or chasing invoices, but not both. Satago does both, and also adds in risk insights so you can easily see how creditworthy a potential customer is.

You can use the Finance dashboard within Satago to manage your invoice finance. Here you’ll see:

1. Eligible invoices: This screen shows invoices that are available to finance. You’ll also see reasons why all your invoices might not be available: 

• The amount is too small
• The invoice is due within 10 days
• The invoice is too overdue
• The company credit score is low
• There’s not enough trading history with that customer

2. Pending invoices: This tab shows which invoices are pending disbursal and which are ready to withdraw.

3. Financed invoices: Here you can see historic data about which invoices you’ve had finance against.

Learn how Satago helped one accountant recover £6k of unpaid debt

We’ll wrap up with an example of how Satago helped one accountant get great results in a short period of time.

The accountant decided to give the Satago platform and our credit control automation a try to help recover some of their clients’ outstanding invoices.

They managed to recover over £6,000 of unpaid debt just 24 hours after going live with Satago, a result they were delighted with. Read more about the story on LinkedIn.

Nurture your client relationships while getting paid faster with Satago

In this article we’ve looked at tips to help you avoid having to chase invoices at all in future.

Sign up today to try the all-in-one cash flow management Satago platform for yourself and see how our risk insights can help you tailor our ready-to-go automated credit control system to your clients to help you get paid faster and with less hassle.