Death Penalty for Late Payers

It’s just over a year since we introduced our Automated Credit Control feature, so I thought now would be an interesting time to analyse its effectiveness…

To recap, this feature lets you set up automated reminders to let your customers know an invoice is about to become due, and then nag them to death until they cough up once payment becomes overdue. Not to mention (hopefully) reducing the need to call the boys pictured above…

The results are interesting – I analysed all invoices raised by KashFlow customers that weren’t paid up front or on the day of issue, and looked at how many days after the due date they were ultimately settled in full.

For invoices where the feature wasn’t enabled, they were paid 30 days late.
In cases where the feature was used, the average invoice was paid within 20 days.

So enabling just this one feature means that you get paid 33% quicker.

I’m very happy with that result – our focus has always been on automating boring stuff for our customers and these stats show that our efforts have a real-world impact.

So I decided to dig a little deeper.

We also give users the ability to add a “Pay Now” button to their invoices. Payment is then taken either via their existing merchant account with one of our Payment Processor partners or by a GoCardless Direct Debit. Of course, the user’s KashFlow account is then automatically updated accordingly once payment has been received.

We’ve already seen that the Credit Control feature helps you to get paid quicker, but what effect does making it easier to pay have on how quickly customers pay up? As you might expect, there’s further improvement:

These invoices are paid, on average, within 15 days of their due date.

So, if you enable both these features, you might well find yourself getting paid in half the time that you currently do. Which is not too shabby.