Studies show that the average amount of time it takes for an invoice to be paid in Australia is 26 days! No matter what business you’re in, waiting almost a month for payments is unhealthy and before you know it you may find yourself in a cashflow hole.
It’s not all doom and gloom for food and beverage distributors, there are many ways you can get debtors to pay up faster.
Automate your payment process:
We know how you feel! changing a process that you have using for years is hard. But without change you will be in the same situation you are in now. A simple way distributors can reduce debtors is by implementing a Payment Gateway.
A payment gateway is an online payment system that provide food distribution businesses with a automated payment solution from invoicing to receipting. The benefit of a payment gateway is you reduce debt and save hours of time every week.
Implement customer credit limits:
You may already experience customers who owe an amount to your business continue to order and accumulate more debt. A great way to avoid this is to implement customer credit limits.
By implementing a customer credit limit your customer won’t be able to purchase goods from your business until the allocated balance has been paid. This limits the impact on your business and forces your customer to pay before proceeding.
Set up automatic billing for repeat customers:
Research shows that 70%of food distribution business's customers are recurring. Sitting down and manually invoicing repeat customers is exhausting and wastes valuable time.
A solution for this is to set up automatic billing for your repeat customers. Using a food and beverage management system you can set up regular invoicing schedules based on your customers usual order days.
Customer follow up:
It’s the most frustrating task for any business, manually chasing up payments from your customers. For many distributors chasing up payments is a daily occurrence.
Automating your invoice reminders is the best way to slash administration time and increase efficiency. Using a system like EasyVend you will be able to automate invoice reminders to your customers, settings can be adjusted and implemented to your unique preferences.
Add late payment fees to the invoice:
There’s no question that there will are always going to be customers who don’t pay their invoices on time. A way to entice customers to pay their invoices on time is by adding a late payment fee. For example, if a customer fails to pay the invoice by the cut-off date, they will incur an additional 1% late payment fee.
How EasyVend can help?
EasyVend by Jeal is a simple and adaptable food and beverage management software that automates the day to day tasks of running a food distribution business.
For us it’s personal, EasyVend provides you with unlimited customer support and makes your transition seamless. Find out why vendors and distributors have been choosing EasyVend for over 40 years. Submit the form below to get a no-obligation free demo of EasyVend.