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We’re all witnessing the effect that COVID-19 is having on businesses throughout the world. As CX expert Shep Hyken remarked: “In difficult times, it is more important than ever to maintain or boost the customer experience.” While standing up for customers is definitely a priority, it’s equally important to have a positive cash flow and ensure you don’t run low on reserves. Here are a few best invoicing practices that can help you maintain a balance:

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Best Invoicing Practices

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1. Communicate clearly and candidly with your customers

Customers might have to make tough choices during these uncertain times, and they may have questions regarding cancellation and refund policies or your Business Continuity Process (BCP). A clear communication strategy can not only address those ambiguities but can also build trust with your customers.

If you offer a self-service portal where your customers can log in and view their transactions, you can display information about these policies there.

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2. Be approachable

If you are sending out automatic payment reminders but your customers are having problems paying, they need a way to contact you quickly and discuss their options. Make sure you include all your contact information in the reminder emails that you’re sending.

This extends to cancellations as well—if a customer decides to call you before canceling the service, it’s a chance to figure out a solution so you don’t lose their business. Make sure you take advantage of these opportunities!

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3. Relax deadlines

Your customers’ priority at this moment will be keeping their family and loved ones safe. So your estimates might be accepted a little later than usual, and your invoice payments may come in a little later too. Instead of bombarding customers with multiple reminder emails, consider relaxing these deadlines for a little while.

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4. Allow partial payments for invoices

As a business owner, your goal is (and should be!) to get every invoice 100% paid on time, every time. However, in times like this, if your customers are willing to make partial payments rather than a bulk single payment, allowing them to do so helps improve your cash flow. And so it is one of the invoicing practices.

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5. Invoice factoring

Factoring invoices is an option that businesses can use to meet their immediate cash needs. The businesses get paid a reduced amount upfront by the factoring companies, who in turn collect payments from customers when they are due.

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6. Offer credits and discounts

By offering discounts for your outstanding invoices, you are proving that you care enough about your customers to give them a bit of a break.

Alternatively, you can offer credits to be applied on their next subscription renewal.

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7. Pause, don’t cancel

With worldwide travel restrictions and shutdowns in place, businesses have already started slowing down. It’s only natural for your customers to cancel some of their services. To keep them from churning permanently, provide an option to pause the subscription for a while, instead of canceling it altogether.

Alternatively, you can extend the next subscription renewal date by a month or two without charging the customers. Think carefully before offering this, though, because not all businesses can afford to continue offering services free of charge.

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8. Write off invoices in special cases

Even after you offer a discount or extend the deadline for payment, if a customer is severely impacted by this pandemic and won’t be able to pay you back any time soon, you can try to collect partial payments and write off the remaining invoice amount.

Writing off an invoice is the last resort. To ensure you don’t write off too large a portion of your receivables, it’s good to regularly monitor your bad debt incurred during this period. And so it is the on of the best invoicing practices.

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9. Increase credit limits for loyal customers

If a customer has been with you for a long time and is sticking with you during this period, an increased credit limit is a good way to thank them for their business. By increasing their credit limit, you are letting them know that you continue to want their business.

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10. Know why your customers leave

If your customers choose to cancel their subscription, you should definitely ask them if they’d like to give a reason. This information can not only help you understand your customer trends, but also reduce your churn. Depending on the reason they enter, you can have your customer support or retention team give them a call and try to win them back.

Though some of these tips might have a negative effect on your finances temporarily, they can gain you long-term benefits like customer loyalty and customer retention, which will help your business recover more easily. And hence helpful for invoicing practices.

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To help you implement these strategies, Zoho’s invoicing solutions—Zoho Invoice and Zoho Subscriptions—offer all of these functions either directly or through integrations.

Did you find these tips useful? Can you think of some other cash flow strategies that businesses can use to get through difficult times? Let us know in the comments.

Take care and stay safe! We’ll get through this together.

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How do I change the primary email address that is used to access my Zoho Invoice account?

To change your primary email address, kindly follow the below mentioned steps:

• Log into accounts.zoho.com
• Select My Profile Info and click on the Email Preferences tab.
• Click on the Add Email button present on the top-right corner and enter the email address which you would like to make as primary.

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• Enter your account’s password and click on the Add Email button.

• Now, hover your cursor over the newly added secondary email, and click on the green mailbox icon.

• This action will make the newly added email address into your new primary email address.

• You can now use this primary email address to access all the Zoho applications.

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What happens when I import the same file twice in Zoho Invoice? Will the already existing data get overwritten?

When you import the same file twice, the entries of the file won’t replace the already existing files. Instead, it skips the existing entries and imports the ones that are new.

PS: This rule does not apply if you choose “Overwrite” option while importing data in the Contacts and Items modules. By clicking this, all the values in the existing records will be replaced with the imported ones and cannot be restored

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Is it possible to add SPF and DKIM records to validate transactional emails from Zoho Invoice?

Yes. You can include zoho.com to your SPF (Sender Policy Framework)record. This entry represents all mail sending services of Zoho, and therefore including this entry would be sufficient if you use any other Zoho Product as well.

Note: Configuring this helps in cases where emails sent from customer addresses, might sometimes be caught in the recipient’s spam filter. To avoid this, we recommend you to add zoho.com in the SPF record of your domain’s DNS settings.

We hope that adding SPF record would be enough and there would no need for adding our public DKIM keys.

However, feel free to contact support[at]zohoinvoice[dot]com should you require any assistance on this regard.

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Can we use an external SMTP to send emails from Zoho Invoice?

No. Currently we do not have an option to use external SMTP to send emails from our service.

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How do I change the theme of my organization?

To change the theme of your organization, kindly follow the instructions below:

• Click on the Gear icon on the top-right corner and select Preferences.
• Now click on the Branding tab.
• Scroll down to the Themes section.
• Click on the drop-down and select a theme that you wish to apply to your organization.

Changing the theme for an organisation will also reflect in its respective client portal.

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I have three organizations under a parent organization. Will I be able to create individual organizations and monitor their activities in one place?

You can create multiple organizations in Zoho Invoice and switch between them whenever necessary. But, you cannot monitor the activities of all the organizations in one place. This feature is currently not available in Zoho Invoice.

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I have two stores with different names and addresses. How can I use Zoho Invoice for both the stores? Do I need to buy two separate subscriptions?

Actually, no you don’t have to get two separate subscriptions, since there is a workaround for this.

You can create two templates and customize one of them to show your alternate address, by replacing your organization’s address. Here is how you do this:

• Open Settings and click on Templates.
• Clone your Default template and name it appropriately.
• Hover your cursor over the cloned template and click on Edit.
• Under Template Properties, uncheck the box that says Show Organization Logo.
• Next, navigate to Header & Document Information and click on Customize your header content.
• Type in the other store’s name and address and click on Preview.
• Don’t forget to hit Save, present on the top.

Now you can use this template for your transactions, by scrolling down on your editor screen, click on the edit option present beside the Template field, and choose the alternate template.

Please refer to the gif file present below for further clarity:

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How does the Configure Emails option work?

The Configure Emails option helps you to add additional email addresses to your organization. Transactions can be sent to your customers from any one of these email addresses as well. To do so:

• Click Configure Emails. 
• Click the +Add Additional Contact option to enter the name and the email address of the contact and hit Save.

• An email would be sent to that email address with the verification link. The owner of the email address will have to forward that mail to you.
• You need to click the verification link to complete the verification process.
• To send transactions via the newly added email id, just move your mouse on the side of the email addresses and hit Mark as primary.

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NOTE: This flow of email address verification has been set in this pattern, to ensure authentication of the users. As, your Zoho Invoice account contains critical financial information, we make sure that only the right person gets access to it.

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