Are you tired of chasing late or missed payments from customers? Not only is it frustrating for you and your team — it’s bad for business. Besides sucking up hours of labor, it can weaken your customer relationship and cause resentment. Let’s dig into how you can minimize late and missed payments so that your customer relationship remains positive!
Credit cards can decline for many reasons. Some of those reasons may be temporary (e.g. if a cardholder has exceeded their credit limit — a charge today may fail, but next week may succeed if the customer pays off the balance). However, some reasons may be more permanent (e.g. if the cardholder has canceled his credit card and needs to provide you with a new form of payment).
Dunning is a critical workflow process that ensures customers get timely reminders from your team to pay up. With automated dunning systems, it establishes an expected routine that both you and your customer can rely on.
Dunning / Automatic Retries
The dunning process allows you to:
- Automatically re-send invoices when they are unpaid.
- Automatically retry payments when they decline.
We talk about the benefits of automated dunning systems in a past blog - The Case For Automated Dunning. In that reading, it states that up to 5% of recurring payments will not be collected in a month. This usually means that a billing process without an automated dunning system will result in hours spent trying to reach the customer to recover the payment. Allocating time to manually connect with a customer after payment has been missed results in less time and resources spent growing your business. It can also damage the relationship with your customer. They may feel pressured when a real person is reaching out vs. an automated message. Dunning done correctly alerts a customer ahead of time to expect an upcoming payment, knows when a payment is due, and alerts when a payment has failed so that they can fix it in a timely manner.
Of course, at ChargeOver we have solutions to keep you from spending valuable time hunting down customers. Use our Help Center as a self-guide to setting up automated invoice reminders and set up dunning messages. How Do I Send Automated Invoice Reminders / Set-up Dunning Messages
Would you like to see a list of payments that have declined? Use the Failed payments report. This report will show invoices with declined payments where the invoice is still open. As payments are collected, invoices will automatically fall off this report. Report Overview- Failed Payments
Do you have a sensitive customer or a special payment arrangement and need to turn off automatic reminders for that customer? Exclude a specific customer from reminder notices / dunning notices
There are other ways to encourage customers to pay promptly as well. For some businesses, late fees may help encourage customers to take action. Use ChargeOver to automatically assess late fees based on a flat dollar amount, or percentage of the invoice — Late Fees for Overdue / Late Invoices. If you need to give a customer a few extra days, you can always exclude them from late fees — Exclude a specific customer from late fees
For an extensive list of payment processor information and integrations within ChargeOver, follow this Help Center link and explore the list – Payment Processors. In case you needed one more resource to remind you why chasing payments isn’t a good look for your business, check out our blog How To Stop Chasing Payments.
Interested in making automated dunning part of your workflow, but want to talk it through with a team member at ChargeOver? Find a time that works for your schedule!
