What is Dunning (payment follow up) process?
It is a process of businesses communicating with customers in a bid of collecting outstanding money owed for products or services. Any improvement in the payment follow up will ensure the cashflow for survival of the business. Email has been a de facto choice of payment follow up, due to the formality and being most efficient way (Free).
In the Odoo EE, there is a standard feature of payment follow up, having said that, it is still lacking of some features that will be described below.
Excelroot has customized the above function to improve on the Payment Follow up In Odoo CE. Contact us if you want to know more of our Payment Follow Up solution.
Considerations of Payment Follow Up
1) Automation or Manual Follow up
Even though Auto Payment Follow up is preferable, in some SME with less customers or some VIP customers, they may prefer the manual follow up. A manual follow up UI will be to display all the customers with overdue invoices, and allow the users to select the customers to receive the payment follow up email.
Manual follow up interface which give an overview of amount overdue, earliest due date, latest payment date, etc.
2) How to automate when to send and how many times to send the payment follow up?
Ideally, there should be options to allow the user to configure to send the Payment follow up level, i.e. X days before or Y days after the invoice due date (earliest due date of all the overdue invoices), with at least up to 3 payment reminders and more. Also preferable to let the user to select the time to send the email.
For each followup level, ideally, there will have its own email template, such as "First Reminder - XXXX", "Second Reminder - XXXX", etc.
The payment follow up email will be sent by the system, for each customer, according to the above follow up level.
Configure different level of the payment follow up email, based on the invoice due date, which can send SOA only, Overdue invoices only or both.
3) Do not automate the sending to some VIP customers.
In the business, there is always an exception. There are times that user may not want to automate the payment follow up for some VIP customers, but rather using the traditional manual way of phone or manual email. The system should allow for such exception.
The payment follow up recipients should be able to be pre-set.
Setting in the customer to allow to bypass follow up email and set the default recipients.
4) Details of proof of the overdue invoices
It is best that the payment follow up email will have the following attachments:
a) Statement of Account - this statement will provide all the historical details of overdue invoices amount and payments, at least in the last 3-6 months.
b) Overdue Invoices - combine all the overdue invoices in a single pdf.
5) Configure the recipients for each customer
In the real world, there could be multiple contact persons in the customer and the follow up email should only be sent to the particular group of contact persons.
Email attached with the overdue invoices and SOA.
5) Call to action in the email.
Configurable Email template to provide the details of your payment method such as bank account, bank information, swift code, etc.
6) What if the email payment follow up has failed?
There should be a historical log of when the payment follow up reminder has been sent from the system. This will help to support the steps to initiate the letter of demand, after the above payment follow up action failed to collect the payment.
Manual sending payment follow up email to a sing customer.
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