Collections Management: #7 Common Mistakes during Payment Collection

Collections Management: #7 Common Mistakes during Payment Collection

Payment collection may appear straightforward in most cases. Still, as your customer base expands and transaction volume increases, it becomes clear that even small inefficiencies can lead to delayed payments, increased support load, or even revenue loss. When businesses overlook the finer details of the payment journey, from invoice to checkout to failed payment recovery, the impact shows up immediately in cash flow.

​
Here are some common mistakes businesses make in their payment collection process, and how Zoho Billing helps bridge those gaps with a structured, automated, and predictable workflow.
​
Keeping the Long Payment Process

A common issue occurs when customers receive invoices with no clear path to pay. They often ask, "How do I pay for this invoice?" or "Do you accept UPI or cards?" When the process involves multiple steps, searching for bank details, asking for links or navigating through some confusing pages, payment gets delayed or abandoned.

​
Zoho Billing offers a one-click payment pathway through the hosted pages, a payment link, showing a clickable payment option on the invoice PDF, QR codes, etc. Customers can choose cards, UPI, net banking, PayPal, or direct debit and complete the payment instantly in a much more frictionless way.
​
No Proper Follow-up

Payment failures happen for many reasons. It may be due to an expired card, insufficient funds, or gateway issues. Without automated retries or clear communication, business risk misses revenue opportunities.

​
Zoho Billing addresses this through comprehensive dunning management, including automated retries, custom retry intervals, email notification and on-demand retry options. You can pause or resume dunning and communicate clearly with your customers about the failure.
​
Common Collection Strategy

Every customer behaves differently. High-value customers may need a lenient retry cycle, while smaller plans may require a more assertive approach. Using a universal strategy results in preventable churn.

​
Zoho Billing offers multiple dunning rules that let you tailor retry logic, intervals, and communication templates based on subscription, plan, customer, value, or currency. Each rule is executed according to its priority, ensuring the correct recovery strategy for the appropriate account.
​
Losing Customer During Checkout

Checkout abandonment is common when pages are too long, confusing or require excessive information. Customers might say, "I'll finish this later", which often translates to a lost sale.

​
Zoho Billing improves conversion through self-checkout pages designed for clarity, including single-page checkout, Google-powered address autofill, email validation, captcha support, and a transparent breakdown of recurring and one-time charges. This provides clarity on the purchase and holds precise data, just what the customer needs to know during checkout.
​
Giving No Free Hands for Trials

Requiring customers to enter their payment method during a free trial creates hesitation about purchasing. It increases resistance during onboarding and results in lower trial conversion rates.

​
Zoho Billing lets you skip payment collection entirely during trial signups, gathering only essential details and user verification. This reduces initial friction and helps customers get started without barriers.
​
Recreating Subscription From Scratch

When subscriptions are cancelled due to failed payments, some businesses attempt to recreate them from scratch. This leads to billing date misalignment, duplicate invoices, incorrect proration and inconsistent renewal cycle.

​
Zoho Billing eliminates this complexity using In-Term Reactivation, which restores a cancelled subscription to "Live" without creating a new invoice or altering the billing cycle. The subscription resumes from where it stopped, maintaining revenue accuracy and lifecycle integrity.
​
Late Fee Mismanagement

Manual late fee calculation often leads to inconsistencies. Businesses sometimes forget to apply late charges or add them incorrectly, leading to customer disputes or revenue gaps.

​
Zoho Billing offers automated late fee assessment via a workflow-based custom function and built-in late fee configuration for users. This ensures every overdue invoice is treated consistently without manual intervention.
​
Considering Customers As Anonyms

Incorrect addresses, outdated email addresses, or missing fields cause payment failures and communication issues. Customers are often unable to update their information during checkout.

​
Zoho Billing's multi-page hosted pages allow customers to verify their identity via OTP and update their name, address, phone number and custom fields before subscribing. They can also select from saved addresses, ensuring accurate billing and communication.
​
Payment Collection as a Manual Task

One of the biggest mistakes businesses make is treating payment collection as an isolated activity. Without a structured lifecycle, tasks such as follow-ups, retries, corrections, and reporting become fragmented.

​
Zoho Billing brings structure to the entire process by managing payment collection before, during and after the transaction. It automates reminders, manages checkout, handles failures through dunning, resumes subscription through reactivation, applies late fee and provides detailed reports such as Payment Failure, Time to Get Paid, Under Risk analytics, etc.
​
This end-to-end lifecycle approach ensures predictable cash flow and scalable operations.

 

    • Sticky Posts

    • Community Learning Series | Digest #5 — September 2020

      Dear customers, We're happy to bring you the September edition of our #CommunityDigest! Keep track of your subscription KPIs right from your smartphone: Last month, we enhanced our Android mobile app to help our customers get daily updates on their business health. We got to know from a lot of customers that this has made their job much more easier because they no longer have to keep a reminder to manually check on the previous day's revenue or activations. If you have not downloaded it yet, here's

    • Community Learning Series | Digest #4 - August 2020

      Dear customers, We hope you're staying safe and healthy. I'm happy to bring you the fourth edition of our #CommunityDigest with some brand-new updates from us. 1. Daily Business Updates (for Android users) The Zoho Subscriptions Android app has got a cool new update: You can now get a push notification to your smartphone that lets you know how many activations and cancellations have taken place, and what's the net revenue for the previous day. The best part is, you can tell the app when exactly you

    • Community Learning Series | Digest #3 - July 2020

      Dear customers, We hope you're staying safe and healthy. We're glad to bring you the July edition of our #CommunityDigest. New community members can view our previous newsletters here. This time, we have two major updates and three interesting topics for you: 1. Zoho Subscriptions Developer Community Since the inception of Zoho Subscriptions, our team believed that the recurring billing platform we provide should be able to offer an extensive API library that empowers businesses to automate most

    • Introducing: Community Learning Series | Digest #1 - May 2020

      Dear customers, We hope you are staying safe and healthy. Helping businesses manage their customer subscriptions more efficiently has always been, and always will be, our goal at Zoho Subscriptions. We strongly believe this is possible if we grow together as a community and share what we know with each other. To nurture this shared learning experience, here is our brand-new Community Learning Series! ​ Welcome to the first edition of our digest! Each edition of our community digest includes guides

    • Recent Topics

    • Disappointment with Zoho Payments

      Dear Gowdhaman, I am writing to inform you that I am removing Zoho Payments from my website. I cannot continue to disappoint my customers due to the lack of UPI support, as has been the case with my experience so far. Please note that the 0.5% transaction

    • Zoho Commerce B2B

      Hello, I have signed up for a Zoho Commerce B2B product demo but it's not clear to me how the B2B experience would look for my customers, in a couple of ways. 1) Some of my customers are on terms and some pay upfront with credit card. How do I hide/show

    • Exporting All Custom Functions in ZohoCRM

      Hello, All I've been looking for a way to keep about 30 functions that I have written in Zoho CRM updated in my own repository to use elsewhere in other instances. A github integration would be great, but a way to export all custom functions or any way

    • Rename system-defined labels in Zoho CRM

      Renaming system-defined labels is now available across all DCs. Hello everyone, Zoho CRM includes predefined system fields across modules to support essential CRM operations. Until now, the labels of these fields were fixed and could not be edited from

    • Introducing parent-child ticketing in Zoho Desk [Early access]

      Hello Zoho Desk users! We have introduced the parent-child ticketing system to help customer service teams ensure efficient resolution of issues involving multiple, related tickets. You can now combine repetitive and interconnected tickets into parent-child

    • Separate Items & Services

      Hi, please separate items and services into different categories. Thank you

    • Log a call: Call Duration for Inbound is mandatory but inbound is optional

      Hi Team Can you advise on why the call duration for the inbound call type is a mandatory field? We have a use case where we are manually logging a call but do not use the call duration field. The field does not have the option to make it non mandatory

    • Zoho Sign 2025–2026: What's new and what's next

      Hello! Every year at Zoho Sign, we work hard to make document signing and agreement execution easy for all users. This year we sat down with our head of product, Mr. Subramanian Thayumanasamy, to discuss what we delivered in 2025 and our goals for 2026.

    • New Account, Setting up Domain Question

      Hello, I recently set up a new account with a custom domain. But after paying and setting up my account, it says OpenSRS actually owns the domain, and I have to sign up with them to host my site. But OpenSRS wants to charge me $95, which is ridiculous.

    • 【開催報告】東京 Zoho ユーザー交流会 NEXUS vol.1 ～ データドリブン経営・少人数組織のCRM活用・AIエージェントの最前線 ～

      ユーザーの皆さん、こんにちは。 コミュニティグループの中野です。 2026年3月27日（金）、東京・新橋にて「東京 Zoho ユーザー交流会 NEXUS vol.1」が開催されました。 今回は「マーケティング領域のZoho 活用法 × AI」をテーマに、ユーザーさん2名による事例セッション、Zoho 社員によるAIセッションなどを実施しました。 ご参加くださったユーザーの皆さま、ありがとうございました！ この投稿では、当日のセッションの様子や使用した資料を紹介しています。残念ながら当日お越しいただけなかった方も、ぜひチェックしてみてください。

    • Monthly Webinar : Getting Started with Zoho LandingPage

      Our monthly Getting Started with Zoho LandingPage webinar is back! If you're building your first page and want a little guidance, this is where to start. Learn how landing pages fit into your strategy, generate leads, and improve conversions. Here’s what

    • Mass emails - Allow preview of which emails will receive the email based on the criteria

      Feature request. Please allow us to view and confirm the exact recipients of the mass emails based on the criteria we've chosen before sending. It can be quite sensitive if you send the mass email to some wrong accounts accidently, so it would be great

    • Limitation in Dynamic Constant Sum Based on Previous Question Selections in Zoho Survey

      Zoho Survey supports the Constant Sum question type, allowing respondents to distribute a fixed total (such as 100) across a set of options. However, it does not support dynamically populating these options based on selections made in a previous question.

    • SAP Business One(B1) integration is now live in Zoho Flow

      We’re excited to share that SAP Business One (B1) is now available in Zoho Flow! This means you can now build workflows that connect SAP B1 with other apps and automate routine processes without relying on custom code. Note: SAP Business One integration

    • sync two zoho crm

      Hello everyone. Is it possible to sync 2 zoho crm? what would be the easiest way? I am thinking of Flow. I have a Custom Module that I would like to share with my client. We both use zoho crm. Regards.

    • Import MSG to Yandex Mail Account | Fast & Reliable Solution

      If you are facing problem to import MSG files to Yandex Mail account can be challenging if done manually, especially when handling multiple files. A reliable solution is using the MacGater Mac MSG Converter, which simplifies the entire process with accuracy

    • Copy all reports in a folder

      I currently have a database that I need to create multiple charts filtered by market. All of the charts are identical, I just change to of the filters and then I have the next market's set of charts. The only way I've been able to copy charts (reports)

    • OpenURL working Intermittently

      Never had this issue before, everything was working fine up to a few days ago. We have a buttons on reports to open forms with pre-filled fields. Now, there are instances where it will throw and error and gives no feedback. What is really strange is not

    • Zoho Recruit mailserver get blocked by Microsoft!

      Hi, We have experienced this issue twice now, where Zoho Recruit outbound IP addresses are being blocked by Microsoft. We are confident that Microsoft is the blocking party, as all outbound emails to candidates with @hotmail.com, @live.com, and @outlook.com

    • Calculate Hours Minutes Sec in Zoho Creator Using Deluge

      check_In = "8-Aug-2023 10:00:00".toDateTime().toLong(); checkout = "8-Aug-2023 18:00:00".toDateTime().toLong(); //difference = start.timeBetween(end); check_In = "8-Aug-2023 17:56:50".toDateTime().toLong(); checkout = "8-Aug-2023 18:00:00".toDateTime().toLong();

    • Build Smarter Apps with AI in Zoho Creator

      Build Smarter Apps with AI in Zoho Creator This is truly the era of AI, and businesses that adapt now will lead tomorrow. Zoho is already moving ahead in this direction, continuously evolving its platform with powerful AI capabilities. With Zoho Creator,

    • Zia Dashboard Insights : turn your dashboard into decisions

      When you look at a chart or KPI in a dashboard, you would possibly see something like: Revenue: $2.4M ↓ 18% vs last month. It can be a positive growth or a negative one, or a dip in revenue, a spike in deals, a slowdown in renewals—all you usually see

    • Tickets without registration

      Hi, would it be possible to give customers the opportunity to be able to read their tickets without registration?

    • Zoho Desk Answer Bot vs. Zia Agents – Knowledge Base & Ticket Access

      Hi everyone, I’m currently evaluating AI options in Zoho Desk and ran into some limitations with the Answer Bot: Answer Bot limitations Only uses Knowledge Base articles No access to tickets Limited control over sources: Either one Help Center or all

    • Como estruturar automações eficientes no Zoho Creator

      Como estruturar automações eficientes no Zoho Creator Introdução No contexto de aplicações empresariais, automação não é apenas uma conveniência, é um fator crítico para ganho de produtividade, redução de erros e escalabilidade operacional. O Zoho Creator

    • Changing the status of a work-order

      Is there a way to change the status of a work-order?

    • Online Payment Fees

      We don't take many online credit card payments so the merchant service provider (PayPal) charges us the 2.9% fee for processing the amount. I would like the ability for the fee to be automatically added to the total amount for "ease of payment". We'd

    • What is a realistic turnaround time for account review for ZeptoMail?

      On signing up it said 2-3 business days. I am on business-day 6 and have had zero contact of any kind. No follow-up questions, no approval or decline. Attempts to "leave a message" or use the "Contact Us" form have just vanished without a trace. It still

    • Zia Agents in Zoho CRM: a better way to set up digital employees

      Hello everyone, If you've been using Zia Agents in Zoho CRM, so far using Connections was the only deployment method you're familiar with. You create an agent in Zia Agents (define its objective, write instructions, use tools, add knowledge base) and

    • Bank Feeds

      Since Friday my bank feeds wont work. I have refreshed feeds, deactivate and reactivate and nothing is working

    • Logged out

      Hi, just been working on a sheet when a pop up box appeared telling me I'm going to be logged out in x number of seconds and if I reload I may lose any edits, or words to that effect. It did indeed log me out and I did indeed lose my last edits. Any idea

    • Zoho API

      I have little experience with API. I'm trying to get a Custom API working with Zoho creator. I have created a Custom API and created an Endpoint URL, but i get a 9400 error code "The provided HTTP method is not valid for this custom API". Based off the

    • #157127950

      Where did my initial question go?

    • Zoho writer unable to merge documents to PDF with basic fonts in Hebrew or fonts from my computer

      I created several forms that will be merged into PDF files through Zoho Writer and I am unable to receive the PDF in the basic fonts of the Hebrew language or in the fonts I have on my computer. The writer exports to PDF an exchange font that looks very

    • How I Implemented Subscription-Based Access Control and Expiry Handling in Zoho Creator

      I recently worked on a use case where users come into the application to request a service, but they should only be able to continue the process after completing a subscription. The challenge was not just controlling access, but also making sure that

    • Zoho Forms API

      Is there any way to get all form entry list using API? Looking forward to hear from you

    • Zoho Projects : Task should auto-update to 'In Progress' if timer started

      Namaskaram. Right now, if a Task's timer is started, the Task stays in 'Not Started' status. One has to manually update it to 'In Progress'. From a #uxdesign standpoint, it is an unnecessarily two step process to start working on a task. It would be better that, if I start the timer on a task, it should automatically change to 'In Progress' status. Crafted with ❤️ Zoho Gurus | Zoho One Practice Team @ CubeYogi Zoho Authorised Partner | 7+ Yrs | 200+ Projects | 100+ Customers

    • Laatste facturen en betalingen niet zichtbaar in mijn account

      Wij gebruiken ZOHO invoice al jaren, maar sinds afgelopen week is mijn laatst verzonden factuur niet zichtbaar in mijn account, en tevens de laatst betaalde facturen zie ik niet. Hoe kan dit? Ik heb de pagina al diverse keren gerefreshed.

    • Undelivered Mail uncategorized-bounce errors when sending invoices

      Recently we have been getting Undelivered Mail bounce notification when sending invoices. Reason: uncategorized-bounce Some go through no problem some bounce back. We recently sent 10 invoices, 6 received bounce notifications. After reaching out to the

    • Can I import MSG files into Microsoft 365 without Outlook?

      Yes, absolutely. You do not need Outlook installed to import MSG files into Microsoft 365. Aryson MSG file Converter is a dedicated tool that eliminates the Outlook dependency entirely, making the migration process simple and efficient for all users.

    • Next Page