How to maintain steady cash flow during the COVID-19 crisis using Zoho Invoice

How to maintain steady cash flow during the COVID-19 crisis using Zoho Invoice

Dear customers,

I hope this finds you and your loved ones in good health.

As we are witnessing, the COVID-19 pandemic has started taking a toll on businesses of all types. Here are some useful tips that could help you streamline your invoicing and AR processes to keep your business healthy.

1. Communicate clearly with your customers:
During this period, transparent communication with customers is a necessity. A lot of businesses have started displaying messages on their home pages, explaining their BCP (Business Continuity Process) and other important announcements they want to convey to their customers.

As an additional means of communication, you can use the banner message in the customer portal of Zoho Invoice. The banner message is visible in the home page of the portal, so it can help get the customer's attention quickly. You can set up this message under Settings > Preferences > Portal.

2. Relax the deadlines for estimates and invoices:
Your customers' priority at this moment will be keeping their family and loved ones safe, which might mean your estimates get accepted a little later than usual. Same goes for your invoice payments. Instead of bombarding the customer with multiple reminder emails, you can relax your policy and push back the expiration dates and due dates of your estimates and invoices. 

To push back the dates on individual transactions, you can simply edit and make the changes. However, you can also perform this action in bulk (for up to 25 transactions in one go). Here's a screenshot that explains the steps:



You can follow the same steps in the Estimates section to update expiration dates in bulk.

 3. Be approachable:
As a standard business practice, you might have set up automatic payment reminders in Zoho Invoice to go out on specific days before or after the invoice due date. However, given the current circumstances, you can definitely expect delays in payment.

Since you have control over the content that goes out in these reminder emails, think about rephrasing it to let your customers know that if they need any assistance, they can reach out to you by phone or email. This way, your finance team doesn't have to wait and wonder whether the customer will make their payment or not, or spend time sending extra emails. You can tweak your reminder email content under Settings > Reminders.

By making it easy for your customers to approach you and treating them on a case-by-case basis, you can actually bring down the number of unpaid transactions.

Let's say you have done this and have clearly stated how your customers can contact you. Now, what responses can you expect from them?
a) "I might not be able to pay the full invoice amount on time."
b) "I might not be able to pay the full invoice amount at all."
c) 'If you can offer me a discount, I can pay now."

Tips 4, 5, and 6 can help you handle these cases efficiently.

4. Enable partial payments for invoices:
Rather than waiting for your customers to be able to make a full invoice payment, you can encourage them to make partial payments for invoices so that you can have a steady cash flow. If you are collecting payments online, you can enable this option while creating or editing an invoice.



If you collect payments offline, you can convey this information through the 'Terms and Conditions' field on the invoice.

5. Offer discounts:
By offering discounts on your outstanding invoices, you are proving that you care about your customers enough to give them a bit of a break. If you don't see the option to apply discounts to existing invoices, please enable it under Settings > Preferences > General.

6. Write off invoices in special cases:
If you've extended the deadline for a payment, but your customer has really run out of funds and won't be able to make the payment any time soon, you can waive the invoice so you can move ahead with your accounting. 



Since written-off invoices turn into bad debt, use the Bad Debt report in the Reports section of Zoho Invoice to make sure you're not accumulating too much. 

7. Increase the credit limit for loyal customers:
If a customer has been with you for a long time and is sticking with you during this period, an increased credit limit is a good way to thank them for their business. By increasing their credit limit, you are letting them know that you continue to want their business. The option to set a credit limit is available when you create or edit a customer profile.

Though some of these tips might have a negative effect on your finances temporarily, they can gain you long-term benefits like customer loyalty and customer retention, which will help your business recover more easily. 

Did you find these tips useful? Can you think of some other best practices that businesses can use to get through difficult times? Let us know in the comments. 

Note from Zoho: If you need any assistance regarding Zoho Invoice, our support team is available 24 hours a day, Monday-Friday. You can also reach out to us through email (support@zohoinvoice.com), live chat, or phone.

Because Zoho recognizes that our own customers may be facing difficult times right now, we have rolled out an Emergency Subscription Assistance Program (ESAP) to help small businesses through this crisis. Learn more about this program.

Take care and stay safe! We'll get through this storm together.

Regards,
Harikrishna
Customer Relations | Zoho Finance


    • Sticky Posts

    • Zoho Finance Workshop 2023 is coming to the USA. Get exclusive training on Zoho Finance apps, one-on-ones, and more.

      Hello all, We'd like to invite you to our biggest Zoho Finance workshop in the United States. After a brief break, we are excited to be back. This year, we're bringing together our customers and community members for two days of curated hands-on sessions,

    • How to maintain steady cash flow during the COVID-19 crisis using Zoho Invoice

      Dear customers, I hope this finds you and your loved ones in good health. As we are witnessing, the COVID-19 pandemic has started taking a toll on businesses of all types. Here are some useful tips that could help you streamline your invoicing and AR processes to keep your business healthy. 1. Communicate clearly with your customers: During this period, transparent communication with customers is a necessity. A lot of businesses have started displaying messages on their home pages, explaining their

    • Introducing: Digital signature for estimates and invoices

      Dear customers, We are pleased to announce that the much awaited Zoho Invoice - Zoho Sign integration is live! You can now sign your estimates and invoices before emailing it to your customers. Also, you can have them sign your estimates while accepting it. Here is our help document to help you get started: https://www.zoho.com/invoice/help/integrations/sign-integration.html Note: This feature is available across all editions of Zoho Invoice except the Indian edition. Out of all the feature requests

    • Webinar: Introduction to the Client Portal

      Business owners know there is never enough time in the day. Not only do you have to beat the competition and make the sale, you then have to make sure you get paid. In fact, the sales process starts way before the sale, and never really ends. Preparing and getting estimates approved, collecting payments, and fielding customer requests for information related to past transactions are all part of the day in the life of a business owner. Well, Zoho Invoice can offer some relief to weary business owners.

    • Recent Topics

    • Getting error during inserting a record in form of zoho people using zoho api

      import requests import json # Set your access token and Zoho People API base URL access_token = '1000.XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX' api_base_url = 'https://people.zoho.in/people/api/' # Set the form name and data to be inserted form_link_name

    • Você já viu os cursos do Zoho Mind?

      Pessoal, Tem uma plataforma da Zoho chamada Zoho Mind, muito interessante os cursos e vídeos tutoriais que lá possui. Para a turma do Zoho Creator, tem uma dica de Buscar dados em Formulário, segue o link e clique em Zoho Creator. https://www.zohomind.com.br/#/videostutoriais

    • Como gerar gatilhos para pagamento de impostos no Zoho Books?

      Olá Pessoal, boa tarde! Gostaria de saber como vocês estão escriturando os impostos a pagar no Zoho Books. Vi que temos a opção de Bills, porém se eu escriturar nesta aba do Zoho Books para gerar lembretes de tempo de vencimento por exemplo vai refletir

    • Subform Time field to string.

      Good afternoon All. I have a Subform 'Delivery_Receiving_Hours' that captures Day (Dropdown), Time_Open (Time), and Time_Close (Time). I need to capture this data and send it to a multiline field in the CRM. The code, posted below, below will capture

    • Data export

      I need to export our customer's data and projects' data for our purpose but am unable to export full data i only get around 3160 projects and around 2k customer can you please help me to get full data, please

    • Adjusting Physical Inventory

      Not getting very far with support on this one, they say they are going to fix it but nothings happened since November. Please give this a thumbs up if you would like to see this feature or comment if you have some insight. Use Case: Inventory set to be

    • Zoho Marketing Plus : Un outil tout-en-un pour la création de pages, la collaboration et la gestion du calendrier marketing

      Nous sommes ravis de vous présenter trois nouvelles fonctionnalités puissantes de Zoho Marketing Plus s’enrichit désormais d’un page web (l'éditeur de pages), qui vous permet de créer des pages attrayantes et à fort taux de conversion pour vos campagnes

    • Grouping payments to match deposits

      Is there a way to group multiple invoice payments together so they match credit card batches and grouped deposits in the bank account? Basically, we are creating invoices for each of our transactions, and applying a payment to each of the invoices. Our payments are either credit cards or checks. We want to be able to group payments together so when our bank account reflects a credit card batch made up of many transactions, or the deposit we took to the bank that has multiple checks from different

    • Employees can not add some expenses suddenly

      Zoho expense was working fine and whenever there was a new merchant, it would automatically add and also the same auto added in Zoho Books (due to merchant-vendor sync) untill now. From today, it is having problems in searching the existing vendors and

    • Zoho email setup in office365

      When i am trying to setup zoho mail setup using my domain in office365 and it is not working and it says that we couldn't log on to the incoming (IMAP) server and please check your email address and password and try again. I was able to login using my

    • iOS 10: Caller ID new feature?

      Hi, in the update history of the iOS App (for iOS10) - v.3.2 - i found the point "caller identification" has this feature been deactivated again? i cannot find anything on my iphone on how to activate this feature. or does it just work from the beginning?

    • Recommendations to store meeting notes for easy access from Contacts, Accounts & Deals module records?

      I would like your advice on how to achieve this use case for my organization. It’s related to where/how best to store meeting notes from a conversation with Contact(s) working at an Account (Company) in the context of a Deal. The ideal solution (from

    • Bank reconciliation. Match Transaction -filter

      When matching an imported bank statement file we only get a match if it is an excact match on both amount and date. Then a suggestions comes up with a very broad selection regarding amount, and no default "between" dates. I can then go an manually adjust the filter, and have to put in from-to amounts and dates. How do I set a default from-to date?  As an example, I would like the date to be +- 3 days, Thanks.

    • Added new staff but does not appear in other organization list

      Hi, I added the new staff under Sales Manager in the contacts, but it does not appear in the other organization list where I need to create a contact, and I can't select the newly added Sales Manager

    • Integrating Calendly with Zoho Calendar in Zoho Mail

      I moved my office into a business incubator space that uses Calendly for meeting management and events. Calendly doesn't have a integration with Zoho Calendar and vice versa. I was directed to Zapier for integration but it doesn't have an integration

    • Map fields from module X to a lookup field in subform in module Y

      Hi there In the 1st screenshot attached, you can see a subform in myLeads module. You can see that there is a number already filled there - that is the 'Property ID' and it is a single line field. It is the 'Property ID' of an entry I have in another

    • how to create a new line in string in Client Script?

      I want to show an alert using client script, I need to add a new line in String, I assume I can use \n\n inside a string, but unfortunately it doesnt work ZDK.Client.showAlert("First Line \n\nI expect this is in second line");

    • Surely it's time Inline editing from views

      I think the first request I found for in-line editing from grids was approximately 12 years ago - that post was locked because it was suggested Zoho sheetview solved the problem. However, it's now 2024, and in-line editing from grids is just a basic expectation.

    • Multi branding issue with sender addresses

      Hello, I'm currently working on a project involving two (seperate) brands. Named 'Windeck' and 'Prolance'. They've chosen CRM Plus and I'm currently working on CRM, SalesIQ, Social and Marketing Automation. So far, I'm able to make enough separations

    • How to Replace an Assessment in a Job Opening on Zoho Recruit

      Hi everyone, I’m currently using Zoho Recruit and would like to replace the assessment linked to a specific job opening. I want to remove the existing assessment and add a new one. What is the best way to do this without losing any important data or affecting

    • Is there API Doc for Zoho Survey?

      Hi everyone, Is there API doc for Zoho Survey? Currently evaluating a solution - use case to automate survey administration especially for internal use. But after a brief search, I couldn't find API doc for this. So I thought I should ask here. Than

    • Email Campaigns overview page is missing SENT DATE and # people sent to!

      I would like to see the date the email campaign was sent, so I can understand and track when each email campaign was sent. Right now, unless you go to a contact who received a campaign, you cannot see when the campaign was sent (!!!!!!). So, if my boss

    • SEO recommendation of H1 tag for website tittle

      The exact words are “ It is good practice to place the page title inside the H1tag.” Now I already have one H1 tag on my website but it is not website tittle. In the SEO recommendation that is clear too that I have h1 tag on my page. Now I don’t know

    • How to choose other payment methodes than creditcards

      We have connected stripe as a payment provider in zoho books, booking, commerce and checkout. In stripe we selected al major payment methodes for Belgium (mainly bancontact). However, at checkout customers seems to have only the possibility to pay with

    • Introducing Zia LLM: Zoho’s in-house Generative AI solution for CRM's AI capabilities

      Hello everyone, We're excited to announce the launch of our in-house Large Language Model (LLM) by Zia to power our AI offerings. What is LLM? LLM stands for Large Language Model, a powerful AI technology that processes and generates human-like text based

    • How to call a Creator function which is in a different Creator application?

      How to call a Creator function which is in a different Creator application?

    • Can the code in my "Successful form submission" WF be invoked from a function?

      Can "Successful form submission" be invoked from a function? Data gets into a form manually and programatically. My code in "successful form submission" is good and I want to reuse it/call it, from another function which does Insert Into How to achieve

    • Kaizen #169 - Serialization and Schema Management in Queries

      Hello everyone! Welcome back to another post in the Kaizen series! In Kaizen #166, we discussed handling Variables in Queries and associating the query in Kiosk. This week, we will discuss Serialization and Schema management in Queries. Business Scenario

    • Introducing Keyboard Shortcuts for Zoho CRM

      Dear Customers, We're happy to introduce keyboard shortcuts for Zoho CRM features! Until now, you might have been navigating to modules manually using the mouse, and at times, it could be tedious, especially when you had to search for specific modules

    • Feature Request: Notebooks within notebooks (Tree-like structure)

      Dear Zoho! I already migrated all my stuff from Google Keep, Im really fond of Zoho Notebook so far. One thing that could make the service much more powerful is multi-level notebooks (or tree like structure). For example, entering into Notebook named

    • How to Retrieve and Store Expense Attachments from Zoho Expenses?

      I am currently syncing Zoho Expenses with our internal portal. During the sync process, I can successfully retrieve expense details, including document-related information such as file_name, document_id, and other metadata. My goal is to retrieve these

    • Can't get authorization for Sandbox environment using the self client

      Hello, After creating a self client, and following the client-credentials method (as it's not optimat to manually generate a code for every 10 minutes), after inputting the sandbox org id for SOID parameter, im getting the error: "error": "no_org". For

    • Create landing pages from Zoho Marketing Plus

      Hey everyone, Over the last few months, we've introduced various features and enhancements to bolster the marketing capabilities of Zoho Marketing Plus and make it simpler for everyone. To that end, we're excited to announce that Zoho LandingPage is now

    • How to Download Expense Attachments from Zoho Expenses Using Document Details?

      I am currently working on syncing Zoho Expenses with our internal portal. While syncing, I can successfully retrieve expense details, including document-related information such as file_name, document_id, and other metadata. However, I am facing an issue

    • Custom service report or Zoho forms integration

      Hello, So far the experience with Zoho FSM and the integration with Books has been good, however there are limitations with service reports. As with my business, many organisations send technicians to different types of jobs that call for a different

    • Email tracking subdomain

      The Email Tracking configuration screen of the ZeptoMail asks for a subdomain. I have gone through the documentation but could not find more information about how that subdomain is used by ZeptoMail to track the emails. Can someone throw some light about

    • Chart View group X-axis values above a value

      I have a data set with X values ranging from 0 up to 300-400, the Y values are an AVG of the values for the given X. I am interested in the values at the low end of the scale, say 0-10 and want the X values 10 and greater to be grouped into a single category

    • How do I get the Text Account name instead of the Reference number?

      Good Morning everyone! I am very new to zoho analytics. I'm trying to create some pivot tables and when I add the Account or Division name it comes up as a reference number. From my research, I need to use a lookup. I'm having a really hard time understanding

    • Custom API - Need to create a string return value, not only MAP

      @Support: When creating a Custom API it only allows a return from a function of MAP type. The service I'm using requires a string return, how can this be achieved?

    • missing video-urgent

      hi..I have a problem regarding zoho meeting. I already record almost 2hrs for my interview session. After end my session, i'm stop the recording. Its happened when i didn't received any meeting recording at my email.But i received recording 7minutes after

    • Next Page