How do you do your billing?

I was thinking about changing the way I do my billing. Splitting my customers in half and sending half the invoices out mid month and then send the second half out at the end of the month. I think that would help me with cash flow.

Lawn care business tips

I have always billed on a per service basis. Most of my customers send their check withing a few days. A few save them up and send a check twice a month and some once a month. I deposit checks received on the job (I'd rather leave a bill because of the time it takes) plus those that come in the mail everyday. So, there is always a continuous flow of cash. The only downside of this method is the extra bookeeping involved. However, this is more than offset by reducing the amounts of accounts that can go bad. My invoices read "Invoice Total is Due Upon Receipt or within 5 days if mailed, unless other credit arrangements have been approved in advance. See Terms above..." It also saves postage, etc. If you choose a periodic billing system, you could also consider doing one fourth a week and come close to the advantage of daily billing. It breaks up you large monthly billing task into smaller, more frequent ones.

I send my invoices out at the end of the month. I am sure it would help bring in more cash flow if I did it the other ways that were just discussed but for me that would just take too much time to do.

Before ruling this out-of-hand, consider this (assumes using Gopher and/or Quickbooks from a laptop or PDA):
I would appreciate hearing other feedback on these ideas.

See attached notepad file for details.

Those are some excellent ideas Lawn Magic. You are really giving some great insight for others to consider.

i split my customers mid-month and end of the month for billing with a net-15 pay period. i used to go net-30 at the end with all my customers but cash was running thin towards the end of the month. if i doubled or tripled my business i'd start splitting my customers into 4th's and send out a set of bills each week with net-15 to really keep rolling along.

I have been in talks with Gopher for quite some time about the Palm software. If they can have it where you can enter payments with the palm, that would really work out well. It then wouldn't take much time to keep track of customers who pay you on the spot.