In this video, I wanted to share my 3 best tips for improving payment processes in your class business.
When I go out and visit the wider industry and see swim schools and different class businesses operating, often I see one of the biggest areas of the challenging problem is collecting payments from customers. So, I wanted to do a quick video today on my three best tips for improving your payment collection processes and eliminating the pain from them.
Tip one is to automate. So, you can automate your payments through direct debit. Often a lot of businesses give a million different ways to pay. Often, it’s better to just have a very simple, and maybe even just have that one option as direct debit. This means your fees are collected automatically. So, you are ensuring you get paid. And a lot of that the heavy lifting is done for you.
My second tip, if you don’t want to go down that automated route, is to look at one-time payments via a credit or debit card. This is good because it automatically reconciles once a successful payment has been made. So, we now have software first class, this is an option a lot of our customers use because it takes away the step of having to manually reconcile who has paid their accounts. So that takes away a lot of the admin burden of doing it that way.
My third and final tip is to set a clear and concrete deadline for when payments need to be paid. So, if you’re running a term-based program, and you have invoiced customers, I would set a clear deadline by the third day of the new term, for example, that payments must be made or the child loses their place and you take them out of the class if you start to give too much wiggle room that can often be taken advantage. I’ve seen time and time again, where people have been generous and given people extensions and things and they’re still chasing money at the end of the term or into the next term. So, if you are giving that bit of space, it can be really not a great move in terms of being able to collect the money that you are owed for the services you are enduring.
So, here are my 3 tips, love to know your feedback. Let us know in the comments or by contacting us. What is your best tip for managing and collecting payments in your class business?