Mike Andes breaks down invoicing versus billing for landscape companies. Use a CRM like LawnPro to generate invoices from jobs, set 30-day terms with a $10 late fee, and offer Stripe or PayPal to get paid faster. Skip credit cards on jobs over $3,000 because the 3% processing fee adds up.
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Hey, everyone, this is Mike Andes, and you're listening to the Landscape businesscourse.com podcast. Make sure you get online landscapebusinesscourse.com Sign up for the webinar this Thursday, where I can answer all of your questions on how to start, grow, or save your business. Today, we're talking about billing, we're talking about invoicing, and what are the tips and tricks I would recommend you use? So, first of all, let's talk about invoicing. Invoicing is when you prepare the invoice. Let's just make this distinction. Invoicing is creating the invoice and actually sending the invoice out. Billing is the actual collection of payment. Okay? So invoicing number one, if you have a great CRM and you've done scheduling and routing correctly, the invoicing part should be a breeze because you essentially need to look at every single person's customer profile. And if you're on LongPro, you have seen my tutorials already on this and we have in the course. Lompro is the software system we use for CRM and routing and scheduling and invoicing and estimates the whole bit. But if we're creating an invoice, you should be able to just look at a customer's profile and see exactly what days their property was serviced and what tasks or jobs were done at each of those and the corresponding prices. And if you can't find it right on their job visit, you should be able to go and estimate and see what they were getting charged for whatever services were being provided to them. So it should be a quick, easy way of creating an invoice. Now, on the invoice, I would recommend creating a payment plan where they get 30 days to to pay the invoice. And after 30 days, you just put a little thing at the bottom that says, please make checks payable to XYZ Lawn Care. Payment not received within 30 days will incur a $10 fee. And so that $10 fee, you'd be amazed how many more people will make sure they write you a check right away instead of just putting on the back burner, forgetting about it, and waking up in three months and someone owes you four or five hundred dollars for mowing, you're like, can we get this taken care of? So if you have that little fee thing attached to your invoice at the very bottom of your terms, it does help people write that check right away. Now let's convert over to or switch over to billing. Billing is important because some people there's this big discussion, should you do credit cards? Should you just do checks? So with credit cards, you are going to be paying around 3% in credit card processing fees. What's nice about it is if you keep their card on file and run it through a system like we use Stripe, it's called. And in stripe and in some of the other programs you can use online, you get charged a processing fee, but you keep their credit card on file. What's great about that is for people who are out of town or sometimes what we actually do, we will take someone's credit card information if we just kind of think they're a little bit fishy or we want to make sure that. I know that's super stereotypical and stuff, but if sometimes it's like, I don't know if they're gonna pay. They just seem like the type of person to give us problems. We'll require a credit card to be put on file just in case they don't pay their bill. And so one way to do it is to make sure that everybody on your lawn care and like mowing schedule has a credit card on file. And then you give them the option of paying with card or check. So if they want to pay with check, that's fine. But then you have a card on file in case they don't pay or they sell the house and you have like half a month's wor that you need to charge them for, or if they go out of town or whatever, you can always keep that card on file. Or what you could do is just give it as an option, say, hey, we will keep your card on file. And you don't even need to send any sort of payment. We're just going to take the payment before we even send you the invoice. So what we do is we have all the credit cards lined up. The people who have their credit card on file, we charge them at the end of the month and then we send their invoice. And on the top of the invoice it says paid in big caps. Cause we've marked it as paid on their customer profile. And so essentially those people don't have to write a check. They don't have to fill out card information every month. So it really is a service. And the reason I suggest taking credit cards is really about professionalism and being able to set yourself apart from the competition. And it just makes you look like a real authority. And what's cool too is as far as cash flow, we talk about money coming in, money coming out. A lot of times people run really low on money and on cash in a later weeks of the month because they haven't got no cash coming in. And so it's nice to get that quick injection of cash right away on the first and second of each month because you have the card on file and you get instant payment. Whereas if you send a check, whereas if they send a check, you're going to be looking at a week to two weeks before you actually get that check in the mail. Just by the time they write it, put it in the mail, you get it out of the mail, you cash it, take it to the bank and all that. So that's why credit cards are great on large, large jobs like 3,000 plus. We don't recommend having credit cards just because then your processing fees are like 1, 2, $300. And that's just crazy. So that's when I wouldn't even give them the option of paying with a credit card on Lawn Pro, the system that we use as part of the course for landscape business course, Lawn Pro allows people to actually pay with PayPal right from the invoice. So even if you don't have their card on file, if you they can just Click Pay with PayPal and instantly it links to PayPal with the amount that the invoice is for. And they just have to click one button and it's a quick, easy payment. We give people that because we want to make it easy for them to pay. We make it convenient. And they won't think twice because every time they're writing a check, they're thinking about, man, I wish I didn't have to do this, man, maybe I should consider another lawn service or whatever. And so to make it super fast, super convenient, painless, pain free payment is what you want. And so having that PayPal link at the bottom of every single invoice has been a great asset to our business. And that's what I'd suggest for you to do on your invoicing and your billing. This is Mike yandys on the landscapebusinesscourse.com podcast signing off.
