letter asking for money owed

juliakill

Hi I am trying to put a letter together to ask customers for the money they owe and I wondered if anyone had a standard letter that they used. The situation is; my husband is a window cleaner and some customers never seem to be in!! So I thought of putting a letter together asking for immediate payment and stating that we are unable to allow payments to mount up. Whenever my husband cleans the windows, he always puts through a slip which states they can send a cheque, but some seem to ignore. Any suggestions?
Many thanks

Debt_Free_Chick

juliakill wrote: »

Hi I am trying to put a letter together to ask customers for the money they owe and I wondered if anyone had a standard letter that they used. The situation is; my husband is a window cleaner and some customers never seem to be in!! So I thought of putting a letter together asking for immediate payment

How are they going to get the money to you "immediately"? Do you want cash only? Will a cheque do? Is hubby prepared to call around in the evening or weekend to collect, for those that are out at work during the day?

juliakill

Sorry, when i say immediate, I mean within the next 7 days. Cash or cheque is what we accept. He does call round all times, evening, daytime and weekends but he finds some people hide behind the settee ). Fellow window cleaners will know exactly what I mean. So I wanted to put together a professional letter.

richt71

What about starting off with an informal letter saying sorry we've missed each other but we'd appreciate if you can contact us on (phone number) so we can make sure you are up to date and we can continue offering our service without interruption.

That's the sort of thing my paper lady puts through if we miss each other for a couple of weeks. Obviously gives people a chance to call you and arrange to sort it. If they fail to do this then you can follow up with something like 'sorry we couldn't clean your windows today but you account is in arrears. Please call us as soon as possible to resolve'

oldtoolie

Start with a polite note requesting payment, an invoice, and an addressed return envelope. You don't know that they are avoiding payment, they might be on holiday, or spending time in the hospital, etc. If they don't pay before the next cleaning visit, don't clean and leave another request for payment.

It is probably better to guilt trip them with appeals not to stiff a self-employed family man than to sound aggressive.

Then put them on the bad debt list, forget about it and find some new paying customers. All businesses suffer from deadbeats and the best thing is to control your losses by not continuing to work for them.

If you have someone who is a persistant slow-pay either drop them or ask them to pay in advance.

Debt_Free_Chick

Agree with the above. Polite letter first. Suggest they call you to agree a day/time for collection. As they will be suggesting a time convenient to them, there is then no excuse for them "being out" when you call.

As an alternative, give them an address to send the cheque to, if a visit is not convenient.

Seven days is not really sufficient notice at this time of the year. If someone goes on holiday for 2 weeks on the day you put the reminder through, then it will be at least 14 days (and in practice, more like 17 days) before they even write the cheque. To allow for holidays, you need to give them 21 days to pay.

Witholding further cleaning is a good idea - but make sure you can afford to lose the custom.

juliakill

Thank you for the suggestions, I will give them the 2 options; ie call to arrange a convenient time for collection or use the enclosed s.a.e. I am only going to use these letters for customers that are 4 months or more in arrears as it quite normal for customers to run behind with payments and I don't usually expect payment within 7 days, just thought it might add strength to the letter for the persistant offenders, who can't be bothered to pay and just ignore the slips that are put through. But I will have a rethink on that.

Once again, many thanks.

richt71

Might be worth sending out an informal letter to your customers after you've sorted the outstanding ones to say due to a change of our accounts all accounts need to be settled in 28 days (or whatever). Just a thought as 4 months to me being self employed is far too long to wait of customers to pay you.