“Just two months after my team at Wow 1 Day Painting began using Podium Payments, our Accounts Receivable were reduced to zero.”
-Justin Miller, Franchise Owner WOW 1 Day Painting
By Mario Ernesto Ruiz & Paris Picard
The end of the year is one of the busiest times for businesses and consumers alike. But it’s also a time to clear out as much of your accounts receivable as possible before December 31st and bring in some past-due revenue.
The average American small business has an accounts receivable turnover of 54 days. Anything you can do to make a dent in that can have a huge impact on your bottom line. but even if you started today collecting past due before year-end, traditional methods would leave you months out from collecting even a fraction of it.
Mail is one of the most traditional methods for gathering past-due accounts. But if you think it’s working, the truth is that it’s not. Why? Mailing is costly and slow, and it’s not what consumers want. In healthcare specifically, 71% of consumers are confused by medical bills and 85% of consumers prefer an electronic payment method for medical bills (Trends in HC payments 11th annual report: InstaMed Consumer Healthcare Payments Survey 2020).
Sure, you can collect over the phone instead, but that process is burdensome on your team, and only 3 in 10 US consumers feel comfortable paying a local business by reading their credit card number over the phone. (2021 Podium State of Payments Report).
If you want to reach customers about their past due accounts, text is the way to go. 95% of SMS messages are read within 3 minutes and 98% are read within a day of being sent. Plus,
Podium can make the collections experience ridiculously easy for you and your customers with text-to-pay. Merchants using text-to-pay see transactions come through in seconds, with many businesses seeing average collection times of less than an hour.
Text-to-pay collection is faster and cheaper than traditional methods. And it helps cut out some of the awkwardness of asking for past-due payment.
Through text, Valley Immediate Care, an urgent care clinic with 5 locations in the Medford Oregon area, was able to cut down on paper billing and employee labor, save money, and speed things up for themselves and their clients.
“We figured on average we were probably spending $5.00 to send a [paper] statement. We send 600 to 700 statements a month out. Just the saving in that alone pretty much pays for our Podium bill.” Brent Knell, CEO of Valley Immediate Care.
WOW1Day Painting of Michigan has been able to collect a significant portion of their outstanding accounts by sending payment requests via SMS.
“Just two months after my team at Wow 1 Day Painting began using Podium Payments, our Accounts Receivable were reduced to zero.Our average time to payment this month is just 24 minutes.” Justin Miller, Franchise Owner WOW 1 Day Painting
If you’re ready to give text-to-pay collections a shot, here’s how to do it in bulk.
