Protect Customer Relationships With New On Hold Grace Period

With OrderWise Accounts, businesses can now include a customer-specific grace period after invoices are due before placing the account on hold.

For any business managing customer accounts, maintaining tight control over client credit terms is essential. However, although timely payments are required for strong company cash flow, businesses must ensure that placing a customer account on hold too soon doesn’t lead to sales opportunities being missed or damaged relationships. There are genuine circumstances when customer payments may be slightly delayed, therefore it is important for companies to maintain the right balance between account control and customer leeway.

With this in mind, businesses may often allow their customers a short grace period following invoice due dates so that they have enough time to make payment arrangements. This may vary from customer to customer too, as a higher value client may be allowed a longer grace period in order to ensure a positive relationship is maintained. So, although there are clear benefits to offering customers leeway when it comes to payment due dates, businesses must still ensure they have a structured method of controlling when, and when not to, place customers on hold.

Maintain cashflow and keep clients happy with OrderWise Accounts

The OrderWise Sales and Accounts modules both already offer a full suite of functionality to help users manage customer accounts and their credit terms, allowing for simple and accurate control. With OrderWise Accounts, businesses have multiple features to accurately control customer credit limits, keep track of customers who have aged and overdue balances, as well as tools to output credit control letters in order to help chase debt. This suite of functionality also includes Transactions By Period, offering a complete breakdown of a selected customer’s transactions by individual ageing periods.

Now extending the functionality available this month, a new feature has been added to OrderWise Accounts to enable users to offer their customers a grace period before they are put on hold. This is controlled by a new setting against a customer’s credit details tab, where businesses can decide whether that customer is automatically placed on hold when balances are overdue or are provided with a grace period. If the grace period option is chosen, OrderWise Accounts users then have the flexibility to determine the number of days grace that specific customer is given. If that customer account then becomes overdue, this will essentially move the ageing periods forward by the specified number of days so a transaction that would normally fall into one period, then falls into the previous period.

Thanks to this highly beneficial new feature, OrderWise Accounts users can help to protect company cash flow with structured handling of customer grace periods. This also ensures that sales opportunities aren’t missed by placing clients prematurely on hold, helping strong customer relationships to be healthily maintained.

To find out more about our ICAEW accredited and Making Tax Digital ready OrderWise Accounts module, call our team on 01522 704083.