When coming in to take over the invoicing duties at Blue Tent marketing we didn’t have a clear understanding of what payment methods our clients used. We offer clients three choices on how they can pay their Blue Tent invoices: pay by check, by credit card, or via ACH. We had no idea of how many open invoices were assigned to each payment method and didn’t really have clear visibility into when and how much would be processed and deposited into our checking account. Simply put, trying to manage cash flow was a challenge. What did we do about it? First we clearly labeled each customer
record with a “payment method” custom field, then created the same field on the sales order(s) of each customer and sourced the payment method from the customer record into the sales order. We then built custom reports to show “open invoices – pay by check”, “open invoices – pay by credit card”, “open invoices – pay via ACH”. As soon as we are completed with a billing cycle (we invoice on the 15th and 31st of each month” I can easily run the reports and know the exact amount of cash that’s going to be hitting our checking account two days after I send out the invoices. These reports also give Tina in our A/R,A/P department a quick and fast report to load and has a clean and simple list to run
through to charge cards, and process via ACH’s. These simple changes/updates and custom reports have really improved our insight into managing cash, and allows me to send a quick summary at the end each billing cycle to the other partners in the company to show how we’re doing.