Paying Bills Late Rant
I’ve been a small business owner for many years now. First with BMG50 Wireless and then Orange Room Software. One thing that has really bugged me about doing business is when customer don’t pay their bills on time. It really just tweaks me.
Back when I was doing the ISP, I would always have people paying late. Sometimes I would understand, other times it would make no sense to me. The bill comes on the same day every month, yet they “forget” to pay it, or “didn’t see the bill”. They would call me wondering why they could not get online. Ridiculous.
Later I started Orange Room Software. I’m not dealing with people anymore, I’m doing work for small businesses. Yet still my customers continue to pay late. A business they consistently pays their bills late just doesn’t sit well with me.
I do web sites for a handful of businesses. They get a monthly bill either on the 1st or the 15th of every month. I would expect them to pay me within the 15 day grace period. But a lot of times it will go over 30 days. I have my billing software setup now to automatically close the web site down after 5 days late. That’s 20 days after the bill was sent out. I email and FAX the invoice to the customers. Still….
I don’t pay my bills late. Not my personal bills and not my business bills. I setup my bank software to automatically pay my bills when they are due from my credit card. Then I just have to pay my credit card bill from my account. My CC is my buffer to make sure I don’t overdraft my account incase my customers don’t pay me on time. This way, my bills are never late.
I only have one business pay me electronically currently. It just makes no sense to me in this day to not pay monthly bills with the computer. You don’t have to cut checks, mail checks, and keep envelopes, stamps, and checks on hand. Heck, I have never ordered checks for my business and I have never used them for my business.
I recently took a full time position at a company in Reno. It’s working out very well for me. I no longer have to deal with the “business” side of things and I get to focus on just programming.
So starting in June/July I’m going to turn off my T1 internet connection and close the doors on Orange Room Software. It’s just too much for me to constantly beg my customers to pay me. I’ll get all my customers setup with cheap shared hosting at some mega-hosting company and let them deal with billing on their own.
I’m not going to close ORS, I’m just not going to take on any web hosting or light work. I’m raising my prices to $150 per hour and I’m only going to take on interesting, quality projects.
People paying bills late is the reason everybody charges a late fee now. Surprisingly this is not a deterrent people still pay late and pay a late fee and pay late again. They just complain more with a late fee.