Collections Management: #4 Before, During & After Payment Processing

"Mark, I think the payment link isn't working. Can you send it again?" Staring at a message, Mark got on his phone. This was the third time the same customer had asked him that week.

A few minutes later, another message came, "Hey, the invoice total seems different this month. Can you check?" Before he could respond, a new email appeared: "Our payment failed. Should we try again or wait?"

Mark leaned back in his chair and laughed, certainly not from humour but with exhaustion. Payments were supposed to be simple. Why so many questions, interruptions, and follow-ups? "Isn't payment just, send invoice ---> customer pays ---> done?" he murmured.

But as his business grew, he realised something important. Getting paid is not a simple action; it's a journey that starts even before the customer begins paying for the service. Yes, it starts long before the customer clicks "Pay Now" and it continues long after the money arrives.

It is crucial to analyse where your business needs control and where it needs to be automated. Having a system with that kind of flexibility will definitely help as you scale.

Zoho Billing brings that kind of comfort to business. It doesn't just help in collecting payments; it also allows companies to manage everything before, during, and after the transaction is created.

Before Payment Process 

Preparing Customers for a Smooth Onboarding 

The payment experience begins with the invoice itself. Zoho Billing generates invoices that promptly reflect usage charges, proration, add-ons, discounts, taxes, and more. The accuracy and clarity eliminate billing disputes and prevent the confusion that delays payments, such as "why is this amount different?"

Predictable Billing 

Whether the business uses milestone billing, recurring cycles, a prepaid model or usage-based pricing, Zoho Billing aligns every billing event seamlessly. Even mid-cycle plan changes are recalculated automatically, keeping charges consistent and predictable. 

No/Less Extra Effort for Collection 

Invoices come with embedded payment options, hosted payment pages, and a customer portal, providing customers with immediate access to make payments. They don't need to search for payment instructions.

Proactive Communication 

Zoho Billing handles all reminders leading up to the due date. From invoice notifications to upcoming due alerts and expiring card notices, customers stay informed and prepared, significantly reducing the risk of overdue payments. You can even configure reminders on trial subscription where it will prompt the customer before trial is about to expire.

Reports based on upcoming payments  (Top 3) 

1. AR Ageing Summary: Displays outstanding receivables categorised by the number of days. This helps identify which customers or invoices are approaching overdue status, allowing payment follow-up to begin even before the due date.
   
   
2. Upcoming Renewals: Helps businesses forecast upcoming subscription renewals, ensuring they know who will be charged soon. This works perfectly for pre-payment communication and customer readiness.
   
   
3. Card Expiry: Payment failures mostly happen due to issues with the card or an expired card. This report helps you with the list of customer cards with expiring payment methods. This is crucial in preventing future failed transactions and ensuring smoother upcoming payments.

During Payment Process 

Multiple Payment Methods 

Zoho Billing integrates with multiple payment methods/gateways, including Stripe, Razorpay, PayPal, PayTabs, and GoCardless. This gives customers the freedom to pay using cards, UPI, ACH, direct debit or whichever works best for them. The best part is that businesses can now configure a backup payment method in addition to the primary payment method in use. This helps increase the likelihood of receiving payment successfully and without requiring manual or retry attempts.

Effortless Auto-pay 

Once a customer approves a payment mandate, Zoho Billing automatically handles renewals. Payments are charged on schedule without customer intervention, ensuring predictable cash flow.

Intelligent Failure Handling 

If a payment fails, Zoho Billing instantly captures the failure reason, notifies the customer, and triggers the configured dunning process. Customer can update their payment method directly from the notification. Retries occur automatically based on predefined rules, converting failures into recoveries.

Instant Updates 

Successful payments update invoices, issue receipts, trigger provisioning workflows in real time, making everything in sync without any manual effort or follow-up needed.

Reports based on Processing Payment  (Top 3)

1. Payment Received: Displays all recent payments collected, facilitating monitoring of the inflow as payments are processed.
   
   
2. Payment Failures: Essential during the payment phase to identify failed attempts in real-time, enabling quicker resolution or automated dunning actions.
   
   
3. Under Risk:  Displays invoices currently in dunning and at risk of churn. This acts as a key report for understanding which customers are in the middle of the recovery process.

After Payment Process 

Consistent Post Payment Communication 

Zoho Billing automates thank-you messages, renewal confirmations, usage summaries, and future billing reminders. These touchpoints maintain transparency and build customer trust.

Handling Adjustments 

Whether a customer needs a partial refund, a correction or a credit note, Zoho Billing applies all changes while maintaining accurate records across billing and accounting modules.

Visibility on Unpaid Invoices 

Zoho Billing highlights accounts that need attention, allowing businesses to intervene before revenue loss occurs. Invoices that remain unpaid enter an automated dunning flow and appear as overdue, clearly indicating the outstanding receivables.

Reposts based on processed payment  (Top 3)

1. Recognised Revenue: Shows the actual revenue recognised from payments over time. This is a crucial report that provides financial accuracy after payments are complete.
   
   
2. Refund History: Tracks refunds issued to customers. Essential for understanding post-payment adjustments and their impact on customer satisfaction.
   
   
3. Renewal Summary: Shows which subscriptions have been successfully renewed after payment. Critical for recurring revenue tracking and retention analysis.

Zoho Billing Ensuring Seamless Payment Journey 

Zoho Billing brings structure to the entire payment workflow by guiding customers even before a payment attempt is made. It delivers clear invoices, predictable billing cycles and timely reminders that reduce confusion and delays. During the payment process, Zoho Billing eliminates friction with various payment options and provides intelligent handling of failed payment attempts, ensuring the process remains smooth and dependable.

After payment, it maintains accuracy through automated receipts and proper insights on the payments collected. With Zoho billin,g payment collection becomes predictable, automated and friendly with all possibilities to scale in the future.

Up Next: Self-checkout: Next level convenience

 

 

 

• Topic Participants

• Hari Hara Sudhan. S

  

• 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

• Dealing With One-Time Customers on Zoho Books

  Hello there! I am trying to figure out a way to handle One-Time customers without having to create multiple accounts for every single one on Zoho Books. I understand that I can create a placeholder account called "Walk-In Customer", for example, but I

• Zoho Flow - Add to Google Calendar from trigger in Zoho Creator App

  Hello! New to Zoho Flow, but I believe I have everything setup the way it should be however getting an error saying "Google Calendar says "Bad Request". Any idea where I should start looking? Essentially some background: Zoho Creator app has a trigger

• Email authentication

  أريد التحقق من البريد الإلكتروني

• What’s New in Zoho Analytics – December 2025

  December is a special time of the year to celebrate progress, reflect on what we have achieved, and prepare for what’s ahead! As we wrap up the year, this month’s updates focus on refining experiences, strengthening analytics workflows, and setting the

• Marketing Tip #12: Earn trust with payment badges and clear policies

  Online shoppers want to know they can trust your store. Displaying trust signals such as SSL-secure payment badges, return and refund policies, and verified reviews shows visitors that your store is reliable. These visual cues can turn hesitation into

• The improved portal experience: Introducing the template view for inventory modules, enhanced configurations, and PDF export support

  Availability: Open for all DCs. Editions: All Hello everyone, You can now achieve a seamless, brand-aligned portal experience with our enhanced configuration options and the new template view for inventory modules. Your clients will now be able to view

• Zoho Analytics Bulk Api Import json Data

  HI, I’m trying to bulk-update rows in Zoho Analytics, and below are the request and response details. I’d like to understand the required parameters for constructing a bulk API request to import or update data in a table using Deluge. Any guidance on

• Project Management Bulletin: December, 2025

  The holiday cheer is in the air and it’s time to reflect on the year that was. At Zoho PM Suite, we've been working behind the scenes on something huge and exciting all year and now we are almost ready—with just a bit of confetti—for our grand release

• Inventory batch details

  Hi there, I'm trying to get the batch details of an item, here's what I've done so far. I've sent cUrl request to the below endpoint and I get a successful response. Within in the response I find the "warehouses" property which correctly lists all the

• Auto check out after shift complete

  i'm just stuck here right now, i wanna know how to do this thing, now tell me, how can i configure a custom function that runs after complete shift time if employee forget to check-out ?

• How to create a flow that creates tickets automaticaly everyday based on specific times

  Hi guys Does anyone know how to create a flow that will create tickets automaticaly in ZOHO Desk when a certain time is reached. Im havin a hard time configuring a flow that will create tickets automaticaly everyday during specific hours of the day For

• ZOHO FLOW - ZOHO CREATOR - ZOHO WRITER : Get Related records

  Bonjour, J'ai besoin que vous m'ajoutiez la solution "Get related Records" dans la liste de choix de zoho creator (sous Zoho flow). En effet, j'ai besoin de récupérer les champs d'un sous formulaire pour l'ajouter à l'impression de mon document. Mer

• Will zoho thrive be integrated with Zoho Books?

  title

• Connecting email for each department in ZohoDesk

  Hi! Could someone help me to go through connecting emails for each department?

• How do I trigger a Flow based on a campaign response?

  Is there a way to trgiider a Zoho Flow based upon a lead opening an email sent via Zoho Campaigns? I see that the data is recorded in the 'Campaigns' section of Zoho CRM under 'Member Status' and I want to trgigger a flow based upon that record changing.

• All Zoho Flows are filtered

  My two flows operate perfectly when I run them as a test, but when they're activated each run ends with a status of neither success, nor fail, but filtered. I haven't set up any filters. I don't see where to turn off filters. When I test run on a sequence

• Creating Multiple Items on Sales Order

  Hi, I’m trying to automate some processes using Zoho Flow, specifically the creation of sales orders in my Zoho Inventory. However, Zoho Flow's Create Sales Order function can only add one item. I would like to include multiple items in a single sales

• Problem Connection from Zoho Flow and Gravity Form

  I obtained my API key from Gravity Forms via WordPress. However, when I enter my Zoho Flow, it states: Gravity Forms says, 'You are not authorised to access the API." I tried recreating a new API key, but it is still not working.

• Eventbrite Email Field in Zoho Flow Returns "Info Requested" Instead of Actual Email

  Hi Zoho team, I'm using Zoho Flow to connect Eventbrite with Zoho CRM. My goal is to automatically add event attendees as leads in Zoho CRM. I’ve set up the flow and mapped the ${trigger.profile_email}} field to the Email field in CRM. However, I'm running

• "Invalid value passed for Product ID" Error in Zoho Flow "Create Sales Order" Node

  Hello Zoho Community, I’m facing an issue with Zoho Flow while trying to create a sales order in Zoho Inventory using the "Create Sales Order" node. Here’s a detailed explanation of my setup and the problem: What I’m Trying to Achieve I’m building an

• Associating Project with an Account via Flow

  I'm using flow to create a Project based on a Deal status update using flow. The fields exist to pass the Account Name through properly, but when you view the Projects module in a CRM Account Record it doesn't automatically associate the new Project Record

• How to follow up a member in a meeting?

  Hello, I make weekly meeting online with a lot of people. I want(I've been using calendly to do it). I want to do a follow-up to it. I want to send messages via Zoho-flow to all the member that participated in the meeting. How can I do it?

• Setting Delays in Invoice Reminder Flow

  I am currently working on a flow that sends reminders for unpaid invoices. The flow is designed to delay actions until specific intervals before the due date: A reminder should be sent 7 days before the due date. A second reminder should be sent 3 days

• Get Sales Orders Related to Inventory Item

  Dear Team, I'm just wondering if there is a way to get a list of all Sales Orders related to a specific Inventory Item. I did search all articles but couldn't find any article that could help.

• Endpoint Central Cloud Asset Update from Fresh Service

  All, Does anyone use the asset management feature in Fresh Service? I'd like some help on building a flow to update asset attributes in Endpoint Central Cloud based off of an update to that same asset in Fresh Service. The trigger is "asset is updated"

• Zoho Flow Export to Deluge

  It would be great to take a user built zoho flow and export the entire flow as a deluge script including having multiple connected applications (showing the API connections and webhooks) and different functionality in the other applications interacting

• Action Iteration/Loop using Zoho Flow

  Trying to use Zoho Flow for automating following Context - A zoho form entry which has image upload field with upto 5 images setting and files are saved into Workdrive. After form is submitted need to create folder based on some fields and move files

• Zoho Flow - Unable to evaluate formatDate with Zoho Invoice Date Field for Calendar Integration

  Hello Community, I'm trying to automate the creation of all-day events in Zoho Calendar whenever a new invoice is created in Zoho Invoice. I'm using Zoho Flow for this automation. My Goal: When an invoice is created with a specific "Event Date," I want

• Zoho Inventory Sales Order Items

  I'm trying to build automation using Zoho Flow to add items to a Sales Order. In the automation options for both "create sales order" and "update sales order", The item ID is required. However, when I update the Sales Order, it's just replacing the item

• Permissions for Azure Devops connection

  I am trying to set up a connection with our Azure DevOps org but it keeps giving me this error. On Azure I should be able to have admin-level access to everything. Can you please point me to which permission this is checking for so I can enable it?

• Best way to start zoho inventory with bulk openning stock

  We are already using zoho book since long time for cars trading company. Now to streamline more, would like to import the excel data of closing stock of inventory to zoho inventory and to start on. Since we need to track each VIN (unique vehicle id number)

• My IMAP mail suddenly stopped working

  On my iPhone and iPad, IMAP stopped working for my Zoho account with the error "User name or password incorrect" and "Invalid credentials failure" however I was able to access via web with the same credentials. Also stopped working on Apple Mail client.

• Confused by the distiction between matched and categorized when reconciling a bank statement an how to

  I used to use quickbooks. In quickbooks, it was possible to use the check writing feature to add an expense that was on the bank statement that did not go through the AP and check writing process. I would write a check, assign it a number like etf (for

• Not Receiving OTP • https://voters.eci.gov.in/home/family

  Hello Customer, Greetings from Zoho Mail. Upon a detailed review of our delivery logs, we can confirm that other Zoho Mail users are successfully receiving OTP emails from eci.gov.in. However, in your specific case, it appears that the OTP emails are

• WorkDrive for Excel Add on

  Dear Sir/Madam Have installed Workdrive for Microsoft add on But unable to view the same added in Excel

• Splitting Transactions in Zoho Books

  I have read in past forum posts that the ability to split bank transactions would likely be implemented - it's definitely a typical accounting program feature.  I'm new to Zoho and thought I'd found nirvana until I realized this feature doesn't seem to

• Zoho Calendar s’enrichit avec une intégration à Zoho People et Zoho Cliq

  Les journées de travail ne se déroulent jamais exactement comme prévu. Une conversation informelle devient une séance d’échange d'idées, une absence modifie un planning, et votre agenda se retrouve vite décalé par rapport à la réalité. Chez Zoho Calendar,

• Holidays

  Hi; For defining Holidays, you need to add logic to handle the year as well as the month & day. We need to be able to enter Holidays for the next year. I need to add a holiday for January 2, 2017, but I can't until January 1st, which is a Sunday and we

• Zoho public comments are confusing and unnecessary

  Hi, we use zoho desk and have issues with public comments. We started using them because the "Reply" option just seemed very clumsy because of the following reasons: - the top "Reply" button starts what seems to be a regular email, showing the entire

• Zoho API - ticket creation - Validation failed for the condition : Ticket Status Info should not be empty

  Hi ! I'm trying to create ticket through Zoho API, and I'm getting a 422 response : "Validation failed for the condition : Ticket Status Info should not be empty" My request looks like this : curl --location 'https://desk.zoho.eu/api/v1/tickets' \ --header

• Next Page