Seal your revenue leaks: 4 ways to accelerate payments with FSM tools.
Key Highlights
- Deliver clear estimates that eliminate cost surprises, reduce disputes, and win customer sign-offs faster.
- Generate invoices from anywhere, and offer multiple payment methods to get paid on time, every time.
- Easily track payments and automate reminders so your team is free to focus on revenue-generating work.
Every business owner aims for profit. Service providers sharpen efficiency, ramp up productivity, and chase more jobs to grow their bottom line, but all too often, they overlook the smaller details
Consider this: your technician completes a job, reports back to the office, but raising the invoice gets delayed, or worse, it is completely missed. This single oversight impacts your cash flow. A few more mistakes like this may make a major dent in your profits. A study found that 40% of small and medium business owners felt that continued late payments could force them to close within a year.
That’s where modern field‑service‑management (FSM) apps step in. With built-in invoicing or seamless integration with a finance application, they enable you to streamline and simplify your billing process.
In this post, lets look at four simple ways through which FSM solutions help you speed up invoicing, enable easy payments, and stay on top of what’s owed.
Cut the Confusion Over Service Cost
The first step to solving payment issues starts well before drawing up the invoice. It begins with ensuring that you and the customer are clear about the cost of the service. Lack of clarity here can lead to disputes and delayed payments. In fact, a statistic states that 61% of late payments stem from invoice disputes
With an FSM app, you can build and send professional, branded estimates with the price for each service, part, and the taxes that will be incurred. As your services and tax details are already added to the database, estimate creation is effortless. Some apps also let your customers digitally approve the estimate, so when a work order is created, you are sure that your customers know what they will be spending.
Make Invoicing Simple
Generating an invoice is often seen as a complex task that requires a certain level of expertise. This is usually why it is procrastinated, passed on from hand to hand, or done improperly. When your FSM platform has built-in invoicing, it becomes so simple that anybody can do it!
With just a click, a work order can be converted to a well-designed, branded invoice with details of service, parts, taxes, and your payment terms. Fewer keystrokes also mean fewer typos and no missing line items. These invoices can be mailed to the customer from the application, and you can even attach them as a PDF. Your customer has all the details they need to make payments, and you have completed the invoicing process even before your technician has left the job site!
Know more about how you can automate invoicing and simplify payments through a personalized demo.
Offer a Choice of Payment Modes
Your customers may have different preferences. Some may want to pay by cash or check, while others may expect digital conveniences. Inconvenience often causes delays.
To counter this, modern FSM platforms enable you collect and record payments in multiple ways. They integrate with various online payment gateways like Stripe, PayPal and Razorpay, and your customers can pay directly from the emailed invoice. On the job site, technicians can also collect cash payments and record the details on their mobile FSM apps. By catering to every payment habit, you remove friction and get money in the bank faster.
Keep Track of Pending Payments
Chasing down late payments is one of the major administrative tasks that eat up a business owner’s time. Going through multiple invoices, checking their status, and drafting follow-up communication is tedious.
When you have an FSM app that integrates seamlessly with a finance management software, it is easy to track invoice and payment status. At a glance, you can see overdue invoices, partially paid bills, and even verify the mode of payment. Some FSM platforms also let you automate reminders. It was found through a survey by Chaser that using a combination of text and email reminders increased the chance of getting paid earlier by 56%. With automation, you can schedule personalized emails, SMS, or WhatsApp messages to go out to your customers at pre-defined intervals. Done manually, this would take up a major chunk of your time.
To scale a service business, it is essential to have visibility into the revenue you are likely to generate. This is not possible if your invoicing is erratic and your financial data is spread over multiple apps. When you adopt an FSM platform that handles billing, supports automation, and analyses metrics, you save valuable time that can be spent on growth strategies.
Run your field service business on Zoho FSM. With the built-in Zoho invoice integration, you can generate invoices with a click, support multiple online payment channels, and track payments effortlessly. Take your service business to the next level with Zoho FMS.
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