​​How to Track Payments from Clients in 2022

They call us dreamers, but we are the ones who don’t sleep. This may be a familiar situation for all us who dare dream of innovating a big business and doing exciting things.

If that’s you, you are probably losing some good sleep to think about things other than a dream vacation or an award for a trailblazer entrepreneur. Let’s talk about the real culprits – the sleep stealers.

Have you been thinking about how to track payments from clients? How many payments are pending? Did I misplace those bills? Where are the old invoices? How to send reminders to the clients who haven’t paid? When will the payments come? Does this hit a cord with you?

Staying unorganized is a choice and the choice may come down on you raining BOGOs. One payment lag will trigger another, and even before you realize the heat of the matter, the payments that you owe to your employee or rentee, come hurtling towards you. Question remains, how to track payments from clients?

Now we can talk about the deal that can help you get some sound sleep, no heat. As a matter of fact, you may actually rest your head in the “cloud” where Xoopah knows how to track payments from clients. Payments tracked, invoices sent, reminders in place, you can now say hello to yourself, close your excels, and dream the dream vacation.

In this guide, let’s walk you through how to track customer payment data to ensure you are headed in the right direction.

Case Study: Kim’s Flying Hobbies

Imagine this: Kim has a new startup that sells spare parts of hobby planes that actually take to the skies. He sells from his backyard to minimize cost, but of course, he has to purchase spare parts in bulk from a seller. He is not an avid excel file keeper and let’s recall, he himself is a plane enthusiast, not a book-keeper or a tech geek.

Guess what happens next is an unexpected growth spurt in Kim’s business. He could not have dreamed about it. From 5 clients, Kim is now serving 35 and the word keeps on spreading. Some days, he actually wishes things to slow down.

He simply loves what is doing because he is exceptionally good at supplying lubricants, nozzles, tapes, adapters, cylinders and propellers, but he is losing his mind over payments and how to keep them coming in without delay. He has been thinking about hiring a part-time helper to navigate around his multiplying backyard.

That will incur some cost and soon he may have to rent a small warehousing facility. He may have five employees, several importers and wholesalers in the net too. Kim is about to actually take-off but there is only one anchor in place: how will he deal with payments, something he shies away from.

Manual book-keeping still comes with some expected hiccups: Pay a book-keeper (it may hurt the business, if the sales go down unexpectedly). It is still a hassle to track customers and call them for payments. A mysterious case calls in when some regular customers, now acquaintances, lag in payments. The new customers are kind of skeptical whether Kim’s Flying Hobbies is legit or not?

Kim loses sleep. He comes to the workplace disheveled and starts to doze mid-day, only to find out that he missed due deliveries. It is proving to be harder than we had imagined. Kim feels crushed under the load of bills, the excitement turns all blue and the tunnel becomes endless.

Xoopah

To dream big, one need not lose track. Rather, what one needs is a reliable, scalable, and simple solution that automates the payments. Here is a review of what Xoopah can do for Kim and thousands of other passionate people serving scores of customers. You must be thinking about how to track payments from clients?

Invoicing Platform on Mobile Xoopah uses a user-friendly interface on your mobile phone that can easily track & manage all customer payments within the Invoicing Platform. Whenever the customers buy from you, they will receive a notification about payments: Do they want to pay online or offline? When is the payment due? What is the payment for?

Send a Payment Link

Take Kim’s Flying Hobbies. Kim sells a vertical stabilizer for $18 to a customer from his website. With Xoopah, all Kim needs is to generate an invoice using in-built features and a template. The customer receives an instant SMS or an email (whatever Kim chooses) with the purchase details and a payment link.

Collect Payments Online or Offline via SMS

The customer gets the flexibility to pay online using a payment link sent by Xoopah. Or the convenience of paying offline by SMS. Paying by SMS is fully automated and secure with verifications and checks in place. Xoopah offers the customers to align their wide payment preferences and small businesses no longer have to sort out multiple preferences.

Payment reminders and updates

Customers stay updated with the pending payment when they receive auto generated reminders and updates when a payment is made or still due. Once connected with Xoopah, your business will be sending reminders and updates in the most convenient ways. No more panicking on how to contact the mysterious customers turned buddies.

Customer satisfaction

Xoopah uplifts your customers by offering them the opportunity to choose their preferred payment method. Top that with security and hassle free payments that directly link with the merchant accounts – customers come out genuinely satisfied.

Stripe and Authorize.net Integrations

Xoopah offers integration with Stripe or Authorize.net for online payments. These are two widely known and reliable payment gateways which allow fast, secure, and reliable transactions. Soon, you will be spending less time tracking and managing payments and more time focusing on critical tasks.

Invoicing and Tracking Made Simple

You can now easily track paid & unpaid invoices in real-time using Xoopah cloud. With Xoopah’s Invoicing Platform, you can create & share invoices within seconds by following these simple steps:

• Select customer to be billed

• Select due date for the payment

• Add items to be billed for along with quantity & rate

• Select payment method

• Review order summary

Single Dashboard Tracking With Xoopah, you can:

• Get a detailed view of your invoices and payments—right from your dashboard.

• Prepare detailed invoices & share them with your customers instantly, without any hidden charges & fees.

• Give your customers a complete breakdown of the amount charged & reduce chances of friction during the payment process.

Cloud Benefits for New Businesses

Security

Xoopah keeps all its housekeeping on a cloud, which means that the businesses get more security when executing payments.

New entrepreneurs, such as Kim, may be overwhelmed by the idea of financial fraud and phishing scams. Whenever a new business is going online with access to sensitive client data, there is always a concern with security, and rightly so.

Collaboration

Cloud computing helps users collaborate between small teams and co-author changes in a client’s payment history. This way, the changes are not made locally on one device.

Consider Kim. Once he decides to expand to a team of five, with one employee in charge of the payments via Xoopah, Kim gets to see what the employee is doing with the payments without even a single email or message shared between them. Things start to get faster than ever!

Flexibility

Finally, one day Kim gets to go on his dream vacation. But here is a challenge: After two years in business, with several hundred records of payments, he still needs to stay in touch as things roll in his

absence. Kim uses the flexibility of using Xoopah from any remote location. Bon Voyage!

Near Zero Downtime

Nothing is perfect but cloud computing cuts close. With Xoopah, you can expect the businesses to always stay up with near zero downtime due to cloud computing. In other words, the payment links you will send will not appear dead due to a busy server.

The Perks of Payment Tracking

You will start receiving the perks of payment tracking, when you start building a model of your business. Start with chalking out a simple model. Following questions may help you get started:

• How many invoices will you need to generate? You may need to look at your sales history to come up with an estimate.

• How many users will be using the payment system? See how big is your team or are you the sole player for now.

• How many contacts will you need to keep track of? You may think of a higher number than you currently have, assuming upward growth.

• How many payment contact requests will you be sending each month?

• How many emails would you need to send to collect payments?

• How many SMSs would you need to send? Figure out whether you need to use the SMS facility or email will suffice. You may also want to figure out how your clients are responding using the single dashboard that you can use for a simple user analysis.

• Do you need any add-ons, such as marketing campaigns, marketing templates, or managing bookings?

The Ancient Truth

Whether you are a wholesaler or a hobbyist turned retailer, a good business calls for good payment tracking. That’s an ancient truth and a modern rule you will always come back to. So, it is always best not to ignore this to only see uncleared bills and receding funds – one of the top reasons why businesses shut down, hurry-scurry. Start with Xoopah today and make peace with tracking payments.