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

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.



Idea
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.



Idea
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.



Idea
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.


Notes
Up Next: Self-checkout: Next level convenience

 

 

 

    • 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

    Nederlandse Hulpbronnen


      • Recent Topics

      • "Wrong password or login" Problem to configure Zoho on MAIL App on my Macbook

        Hi, I'm having problems to configure my e-mail on my MAIL App(Macbook pro). My e-mail is hari@trespontoum.net Actually was working perfectly, and still working on my Iphone. My MAIL App prompt me that my login or password is wrong. I tried to change 3

      • "User already exist in your org"

        Hello, I've just read a discussion about this issue, which didn't solve my problem. I'm trying to add the following emails: sales@kiss-my-boutique.co.uk returns@kiss-my-boutique.co.uk orders@kiss-my-boutique.co.uk I'm getting an error message each time I try and add them. None of them are primary or secondary emails and none of them have been created as users before. I know this as when I try and login and do 'forgot my password' all I get is an error message saying 'user invalid'. Please advise.

      • Operation Not Permitted

        Hi, I have problem in adding user after verifying the domain but it seems like error appeared which is "operation not permitted". For your information, I had delete other domain before did it.

      • Email forwarding setup fails

        I'm trying to set up email forwarding from my Zoho email to my gmail address. I followed the directions to set up email forwarding here: https://www.zoho.com/mail/help/email-forwarding.html. I did only steps 1-6. After doing this, rather than setting

      • Shopify store email issues- Not getting emails

        Hi We have migrated from Microsoft outlook to Zoho back in March, we have a shopify store, the domain is hosted on namesilo, not shopify, I have seen some people here complaining about not getting emails from customers who fill out the contact form on

      • How do I fix this? Unable to send message; Reason:554 5.1.8 Email Outgoing Blocked.

        How do I fix this? Unable to send message; Reason:554 5.1.8 Email Outgoing Blocked.

      • Invoice Discount Account

        Is there a way to change the account used for Discounts applied to an invoice? The current Discount account (ZB native account) type is an "Income" type. I would like to change it to "Other Income", but that is not possible, I am assuming because it contains

      • Need Inactive accounts to be visible in Reports in Zoho Books

        I N=need Inactive accounts to be visible in Reports in Zoho Books to do recons of the accounts but when i see the same they are not visible in the Accountant - Account Transactions report

      • javax.mail.authenticationfailedexception 535 authentication failed

        Hi, I am facing 535 authentication failed error when trying to send email from zoho desktop as well as in webmail. Can you suggest to fix this issue,. Regards, Rekha

      • Phantom Opening Balance

        While experimenting w/ creating a composite item, Zoho added funds to Petty Cash and added Bank Account equal to previous day's balance. I'm unable to undo the adding of funds. Attaching screenshots of both bank account and petty cash transactions.

      • Importing customer comments and multiple shipto addresses

        I am evaluating Zoho Books and have most of my data imported with two exceptions: (1) Import customer comments - in my current system I have several comments of different types, and I need to bring these into Zoho. Preferably Books customer records, but

      • Detailed Account Reports - Add Running Balance

        When one clicks into an account from a report (say P/L or Balance Sheet), the default reports have the Debit, Credit, and then the Amount. The Amount column (last one) is duplicate information. It would be far better and fit more peoples' use cases if

      • How to Billed from two different GST Numbers

        How to Billed from two different GST Numbers. Suppose ABC & Co had GST registration in Delhi and Haryana and Zoho account is created with Delhi GST Registration number. Now i also want to issue invoice from Haryana GST Registration number. How can i proceed ?

      • Zoho IP blocked by SpamHaus

        ERROR CODE :550 - 5.7.0 Your server IP address is in the SpamHaus SBL-XBL database, bye

      • IMAP Communication Problems - IMAP Down Again

        We are experiencing the same problems over the last week or so that were supposedly 'solved' according to this thread. Zoho Imap Down Again This is affecting attempts to use IMAP on multiple ISPs and users so is definitely narrowed down to Zoho problems.

      • Can't login to Zoho mail

        I'm logged into Zoho but when I try to go in zoho mail I get: Invalid request! The input passed is invalid or the URL is invoked without valid parameters. Please check your input and try again. I just set up my mx records and stuff with namecheap a few

      • Hotmail is STILL blocking the zoho mail IP

        Greetings, as I already mentioned in my last message, my Zoho IP has been blocked by Hotmail for more than 15 days. Although someone said that the issue was "solved," it still isn't, and this amount of time seems neither normal for a "serious" company,

      • Keyboard shortcut M key

        I'm trying to customize my keyboard shortcuts and assign the "m" key. But it says the key is already assigned. I've looked through all my shortcuts and can't see any assigned "m". When I select an email and press the M key, nothing happens. What is the

      • Manage customer access across multi-brand help centers

        Hello everyone! Managing customer's access across multiple brands has been streamlined with the ability to invite, reinvite, approve, reject, and deactivate contacts individually for each help center brand . This enhancement gives administrators precise

      • White Label certificate

        Hi all, About 72 hours ago, we fulfilled all steps for white labeling (CNAME to point to mail.cs.zohohost.eu), but since then the configuration page is now stuck at "generating certificate" since 3 days. When I execute an NSLOOKUP mail.webfoundry.be it

      • Unusual activity detected from this IP. Please try again after some time

        When i try to create new addresses on my account i am getting this error, it has been 24 hours now and i am still getting this error can anyone help

      • How to add a new domain in my account?

        Probably zoho has the worst UI in the market. Cannot add a new domain to manage a new email address.

      • Ability for admin to access or make changes in zoho form without asking for ownership

        Currently in zoho form only form owner can make the changes in the form and if someone else has to make changes then we have to transfer the ownership to them and even admin also cant access it . So i think admin must have the ability or option to access

      • Report sorting not working

        I make extensive use of Summary reports and Pivot Tables. Most of these reports are structured such that I have several columns of "information" data that I want displayed, followed by one or more "Data" summarizations. For example, I have the following

      • New Enhancements in Wizards

        Dear All, Wizards help you break a long form into a series of smaller forms on different screens, making it less overwhelming. We are thrilled to introduce a couple of enhancements to wizards in Zoho CRM: Enhancements for conditional rules in Wizards

      • Find and Merge Duplicates to trigger webhook

        My sales team uses the Find and Merge Duplicates feature often to cleanup records in the CRM. We use webhooks to signal to our internal tools database when new Contacts are created, updated, or deleted, in order to keep our DB in sync with Zoho CRM. However,

      • Charting the 2025 Voyage: Zoho Invoice's Year in Review

        2025 has been a year of progress, productivity, and purposeful growth for Zoho Invoice. From expanding into new regions to refining everyday workflows, each update was designed to help businesses stay compliant, get paid faster, and work with confidence.

      • How to Hide System-DefinedTemplates in Service Report

        Is there any option available to hide system-defined templates? these templates are causing confusion for field users.

      • WhatsApp Report in Bigin CRM

        Reporting feature for Bigin CRM’s integrated WhatsApp that provides insights such as: Number of WhatsApp conversations closed Number of messages sent and received Number of conversations replied to Response and closure metrics for WhatsApp chats More

      • Issue with Azure DevOps Integration in Zoho Flow

        Hello, All workflows between Zoho Flow and Azure DevOps have stopped working for several days now. Upon further investigation, it seems that the connection to Azure DevOps is no longer directly supported. Indeed, Microsoft has deprecated the Azure DevOps

      • Narrative 16: Simplify with workflows

        Behind the scenes of a successful ticketing system: BTS Series Narrative 16: Simplify with workflows What is a workflow? A workflow organizes business tasks in a defined sequence that makes each step clear to all participants. This ensures work is completed

      • Zoho Invoice Customer Login Portal

        Are there any plans for a customer portal to Zoho Invoice, ala Freshbooks?  I would like customers that I invoice to be able to login to review invoices and invoice history.  I have not switched from Freshbooks for this very reason.

      • Random Leads are being created

        Hi, Every few days I am getting random leads that are being created with no form interactions at all. The email addresses are from obvious spam, such as 'Easymerchantsx'. When I look at the timeline, there is a Visit record and then a Lead Created record,

      • Print a price list or price book

        Hi Community. Am I right in concluding that Zoho has no functionality to print a price list from either Zoho CRM, Zoho Inventory or Zoho Books? I won't get stuck on the fact that Zoho doesn't sync price books between Zoho CRM and Books/Inventory (more

      • Bar Chart -- sort X-axis

        Hi! I created a bar chart ("Top 10 Products by Revenue") X-axis: Product Name Y-axis: Revenue Filter: Revenue - Top 10 Here's a picture: http://screencast.com/t/ZTJlZTdkNz The x-axis is sorted alphabetically by Product Name. How can I force it to sort numerically by Revenue?

      • ZoHo Flow Custom Function not Processing JSON

        JSON is being escaped and converting all the quotes in the JSON to '"' Here's the Code: void InsertRowInE123EligibitySheet(map input) { rawData = get("data",""); decodedData = rawData.htmlDecode(); data = decodedData.toMap(); sheet_id = "ID GOES

      • Managing functions

        Can someone let me know if there are any plans to improve the features for managing functions in CRM? I have lots of functions and finding them is hard. The search only works on the function name and the filter only works on function type. I have created

      • Zoho FSM - Service Appointment Trouble Adding Field Agent

        Hello, I just started using Zoho FSM and I'm currently adding older work orders from prior Field Service application I use. The work order that im trying to add is from an earlier date, and when I try to add a field agent to a service appointment it does

      • 年内最後のユーザー向けイベント：5名限定！ 課題解決型ワークショップイベント Zoho ワークアウト開催のお知らせ (12/18)

        ユーザーの皆さま、こんにちは。コミュニティチームの中野です。 12月開催のZoho ワークアウトについてお知らせします。 今回はZoomにて、オンライン開催します。 参加登録はこちら（無料） https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/QHn6kJAcRs-znJ1l5jk0ww ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Zoho ワークアウトとは？ Zoho ユーザー同士で交流しながら、サービスに関する疑問や不明点の解消を目的とした「Zoho ワークアウト」を開催します。

      • How do I get my account id?

        Hello, I followed the instructions to get a list of accounts of the currently authenticated user (which is me, and I am logged in). But when I follow the below instructions I get the following error: ERROR: {"data":{"errorCode":"INVALID_TICKET","moreInfo":"Invalid ticket"},"status":{"code":400,"description":"Invalid Input"}} Instructions that I am following: GET - User account details Purpose The API retrieves the list of accounts of the currently authenticated user.  Request URL  http://mail.zoho.com/api/accounts

      • Next Page