How to Enforce Discount Terms through Emailed Invoices

It may be a story that has played out in your business all too often. You email an invoice to your customer which includes an early payment discount. After the discount period ends and you call to push for payment, the customer claims they haven’t received your email containing the invoice. Since you cannot definitively confirm nor deny their claim because of the lack of certainty in email delivery, you resend the invoice and extend the discount period. Of course, this extension then lengthens the time it takes for you to receive payment, subjecting your business to unpredictable cash flows and forcing you to accept an unearned reward for the customer.

While discount terms are meant to help improve cash flow, with standard email, the practice can be manipulated since it offers no way to confirm if and when your customers opened the invoice containing the terms of the discount. This lack of visibility into the status of your emails leaves your organization vulnerable to the claim “I never got your invoice.” Whether innocent or on purpose, such claims happen all the time increasing your company’s DSO and squeezing cash flow.

Even if you use an ERP like Oracle, JD Edwards, or SAP to email invoices, it’s hard to hold your customers accountable for payment terms without more transparency into the delivery process. Consequently, many businesses find themselves using a considerable amount of resources, calling recipients to follow up on emailed invoices. While such efforts may have a small positive effect on your cash flow, you’ve now introduced inefficiency into your process increasing your costs.

AventX Mail SC for ERP systems provide businesses with a way to send their critical documents like invoices or purchase orders with confirmation that their customers/recipients have received and read the documents sent.

With AventX, you can automatically send reminder emails if your invoice isn’t opened within a certain timeframe. In addition, you can automatically receive notification that a customer has not viewed your invoice within a configurable timeframe. These valuable tools offered by AventX help you to enforce payment terms, increase cash flow, decrease DSO, and achieve maximum efficiency in your accounts receivable process.

What’s Next?

• To learn more about the advantages of sending invoices and other critical documents with AventX, click here.
• Related Post: “Are your invoice emails getting ignored?”