I hate to just be a re-poster but once in a while we’ll sacrifice originality for quality. The great Ed Poll tweeted this today from his LawBiz Forum, How to Get Paid: It’s in your hands. Take a look at the full post, he’s got 9 golden nuggets that can each help put dollars in your pocket.
Some new-to-me billings ideas:
Have a high billable to collected ratio. In other words what % of the time you’ve billed to clients is actually getting paid. Interestingly, if you’re under 80% that’s a problem for sure, but also, if you’re over 95% that could be an indication of too low of billing rates.
Collection cycle management. See the full post…I actually implemented part of this that I had previously read in one of Ed’s book by shifting our billing cycle close date to the 24th day of the month from the last day of the month. Another idea he lists is breaking up the alphabet and billing different chunks of the alphabet say every week or 10 days, spread throughout the month. Perhaps when the number of bills I’m sending out each month gets larger this MAY be viable, but it sounds like a tad of a hassle to be doing billing 3/4 times per month.
Don’t ask for money yourself. Separate yourself from the billing function.
If necessary, use a collection service. I DISAGREE with this. From my experience collection agencies can be as much of a pain in the butt for the creditor as they can be for debtor. We used to use a collection agency as sort of our last resort. I soured on them because we had a client who we referred out to a collector who called then called him. Then we didn’t get immediate payment but we cut a deal with the client about how to proceed. But the collection agency would not stop contacting this person and it became a real problem between the client and I. I’ve sworn off collection agencies. It’s kinda like dealing with foreclosure law firms as part of a real estate transaction, they can’t unlearn the harassment habits no matter the type of scenario.
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