Product Updates

ZenCash users already know that to get paid faster it’s important to follow up consistently on outstanding invoices.

Until today, your invoice follow-up was sent on beautifully printed stationary on thick card-stock, nudging your slow-paying clients and saying thanks to those that pay on-time. We’ve heard that while you love sending these notes and invoices because they make you look good and they get your invoices paid faster, you want the option to follow up over everyone’s favorite communication channel – email.

Today we launch email-based follow-up actions to active ZenCash users (that means you’ve enabled your action timeline and maintain valid billing information). Email-based follow-up actions are digital equivalents of our traditional print+mail actions, which means that you can rely on your customers receiving the same professional, positive impression from your ZenCash email actions as from our beloved thank you notes, reminders and invoices. We’ve also included the most important details about the invoice so they know exactly what to pay, like in the screenshot below:
ZenCash Email Reminder Action

There are several major advantages of email-based follow-up actions over our traditional print + mail actions:

They’re fast – of course – so you know your customer is getting your note or invoice on the day they’re scheduled, between the hours of 10am to 5pm Eastern Time.

They’re sent to all of the contacts on file for your customer to give you the best chance of connecting and therefore nudging the invoice toward payment.

They confirm delivery. Now you know when your customer has opened your note or invoice. As soon as your customer opens the email action (if they allow images in their email), we’ll let you know it’s been successfully performed, just like in the screenshot below:
They’re free

But there’s one limitation to email actions… for now there is a limit of 100 email-based actions per month. If you’re approaching this limit it means you should consider taking your receivables to the next level with ZenCash’s Managed AR Service, a tailored, serviced plan for your business (no action caps or limitations) for small to medium-sized companies.

Add New Email Action

ZenCash users have been asking for email-based follow-up for a long time, so this is an especially exciting feature launch for us. We know it’s going to be another amazing tool that makes ZenCash both a joy to use and an indispensable tool for small business owners.

Remember: the most successful AR strategies follow up with customers over multiple channels (phone, print, email) at regular intervals over the life of the invoice. Use your actions wisely.

Let us know how you use email actions and if you have any suggestions for improvement in the comments below.

Our primary goal is to get you the money you’ve earned. After spending the last few months talking to almost all of our customers individually about their accounts receivables pain, we planned and built out some great new things for you—including our amazing new Receivables Dashboard. We are excited about what’s in store for this week’s release and for the future! But first, some numbers for you….

Receivables Management Study

One recent learning experience for us came through a study we conducted with our friends at Lab42. We asked them to survey 100+ small businesses who use cloud-based accounting systems and who have revenues of between $5 and $50 million. The topic: learn more about their business’ processes for managing accounts receivable, especially how much time gets wasted following up on invoices.

Here are a few of the key findings:

AR is anything but a solo task. In fact, 40% of small businesses have at least 5 or more people involved.
Of the companies surveyed, 36% spent 11-40 hours per month on accounts receivable, 37% spent 41-160 hours and 18% spent more than 160 hours per month.
Of the companies surveyed, 74% had two or more full-time people engaged in receivables management, and 41% had more than 5 people regularly engaged in receivables management.
Of the time spent on AR tasks, about half of it is spent either tracking and managing the process or printing and mailing invoices and reminder notes.
Of the companies surveyed, 92% of invoices required at least one additional touch to get paid!

So, it is with this data that we bring you the new, elegant, Receivables Dashboard!

New: ZenCash Receivables Dashboard

We’ve built some pretty great tools for managing your AR, but we are constantly sculpting and pushing our products to new places as we learn from you along the way. One such learning is regarding the “first impression” inside the app—and specifically, how could ZenCash do a better job of surfacing the most important bits of AR data in one place.

I am excited to announce that today that we are bringing our sexy new dashboard to life!

At the top, we bring the most important metrics together: Average Days to Pay and your total outstanding amounts. Over to the right, you can see the total broken down into three buckets: Current (shown in green), Past Due (yellow), and Default (red).

Then, there is a three-panel chart that allows you to select one of the these three views:

Weekly receivables history

This shows you a week-by-week look at how healthy your company is from an AR perspective. So ideally, each week would show all “green”—and you want the trend to be more green over time, vs more yellow or red.

Outstanding invoices by due date

This shows a current snapshot of all outstanding invoices, plotted on a timeline by their respective due dates. So you can see with clarity the distribution of your accounts receivable. Are there a bunch clumped up on the left in red? Or are things mostly clean on the left side of the timeline and there’s just nice green ones near the right?

Payments by payment date

This chart reveals just the payment information for your business without regard to the underlying invoice date, due date, etc.

Section 3 provides two tables—one showing recent actions that have been completed by us and the one on the right showing upcoming actions. You will note that any actions that are performed in the current stage will show up in green, while actions performed when an invoice is past due will show up in yellow, and ones in default, in red.

Finally, one of our favorite parts of the dashboard is this last section—and not because we have some weird desire to highlight your problems, but because it’s healthy to know where your weaknesses are so you can tackle them head on.

Gallery of Debtors

(Best said out-loud and in a tunnel of some sort so you get an over-done echo) This section serves as a visual reminder of where your most challenging customers are—sorted either by the largest outstanding amounts, or by the highest days to pay. In both cases, we also show what percentage of your overall AR each customer makes up, helping you to see any possible concentration risk.

That’s it. We hope you enjoy it. Use it a bit and then give us some feedback. If you love it, tweet it. If you hate it, email me at bc at zencash dot com and tell me about it personally.

The Zen Room

Elegant invoice follow-up, at light speed

Study Shows Enormous Cost of Receivables Management; ZenCash Launches Receivables Dashboard to Help