How Should You Approach Past-Due Customers? This is a problem for every small business. You don’t want to come on too strong and threaten the goodwill you’ve built with your customers, but you have your cash flow to consider. Here are some approaches: • Set up payment reminders so you’ll remember to send follow-up emails. Go to Edit | Preferences | Payments | Company Preferences. Answer the questions under Payment Reminders. • Automate reminders. Open the Customers menu and select Payment Reminders | Schedule Payment Reminders. This step is a little complicated; you may want our help. You’ll be creating schedules to automate the sending of invoices or statements at intervals you define. So you might dispatch an invoice to All customers when their payments are 15 days after the due date, for example. Click Add reminder to see the default text for the email accompanying the invoice and edit it. • • Figure 2: QuickBooks can automatically send out reminder invoices and statements when customers are a specific number of days past due. • • Send a handwritten note. This is only realistic, of course, if your customer base is small or isn’t often delinquent on payments. Handwritten notes are so SOAR TO SUCCESS / Core Business Strategies unusual these days that they’re more likely to get noticed than an email. Don’t know how to create statements in QuickBooks? Go to Customers | Create Statements. Here, you’ll tell QuickBooks who should receive statements and specify any other preferences you might have for their content. How Do You Turn On Reminders? Turning on the Reminders tool in QuickBooks can help keep you current on bills, invoices, and other critical tasks. Open the Edit menu and click Preferences. Click Reminders and make sure the box is checked under the My Preferences tab so Reminders will open every time you run QuickBooks. Click Company Preferences and tell QuickBooks which reminders youwant to see and when. Figure 3: QuickBooks’ Reminders tool can help you stay current with bills and invoices, and other critical activities. Making 2023 a Better Year Using QuickBooks Tools Now that you know how to clean up your receivables and payables from 2022, next month’s topic will discuss steps you can take in QuickBooks to make 2023 a more productive - and hopefully, prosperous - year, including evaluating your inventory.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTQ2Nzk4