What’s the best that could happen?

Every small business owner knows what they need for their business to survive the lean times and they have a plan in place for when downturns happen. Savvy business owners have plans for pivoting their offerings to balance those slowdowns in their business. For example, a landscaping company in a snowy region will anticipate that the demand for mowing lawns will be drastically reduced in the fall and winter months. Many will offer supplemental services during these months like snow removal services or even holiday light installations to keep their income steady until the greener grasses of spring bring on higher demand.

Unfortunately, not as many businesses are prepared for a best case scenario. What happens if your business is growing fast? How do you handle a sudden influx of customers and an increase in demand? How do you balance that with your core business if you anticipate that the increased volume is temporary? 

One quick and easy way to get an idea of how your business would perform during a surge in demand is to look at your processes. If you receive twice or triple the number of inbound phones calls and emails, what would that look like? Would you need more staff to respond? If you booked twice or triple the number of customers, how would that impact your billing? Would you be able to send invoices and collect payments at the same rate that you’re doing today? Would you need to expand the types of payments that you accept? Would you need to adjust your collections strategy for overdue bills?

Let’s say your landscaping business did some excellent work in the winter months with installing holiday lights and you’re planning ahead for this year to increase staff and have more unique offerings for your customers this year. You’d probably start bringing in additional staff around November, right? Well, guess what? Your customer from last year just loved what you’d done so much that now they want you to do something similar for Halloween this year! Sounds good, right?

And then let’s say the Best Case Scenario happens – everyone in the neighborhood wants their yard to look good, too! Now you have an additional 40 homes wanting Halloween lighting and decor. So you’re going to need to bring in your staff months sooner than originally planned and also start planning with your suppliers for what is needed.

That means you, as the business owner, are going to be pretty busy. Any way you slice it, you’re going to need more help. And a critical part of that is collecting payments. How many staff will you need? What will their role be? Unlike other aspects of your labor force, accounting help is much more difficult to find for short-term work and can create more risk. 

The good news is that you can prepare today for a best case scenario in the future – whether it’s on the horizon or might be an unexpected surprise. By building your accounting department with automation you can take advantage of time savings now and be ready to pivot or scale any time.

Chargezoom allows you to schedule your invoices to send automatically – have a recurring or subscription customer that needs an invoice on the 20th of every month? No problem. You can completely customize the email that is sent to your customer and allow them to pay instantly with a single click. Have an influx of new and one-off clients that need invoices? We’ve got your back – batch them all in a single click to send invoices to everyone.  Need your customers to manage their own payments and keep their billing details up to date? The Chargezoom Customer Portal allows you to control which details your customers can update on their own. We can even provide you with details of the customers who have credit cards that will expire soon so that you can prompt them to update their details before a payment fails. And of course, the biggest and best time saver of all is that every payment is reconciled immediately as it happens and synced directly to your accounting package (QuickBooks Desktop, QuickBooks Online, FreshBooks, or Xero) with GAAP compliance. You won’t need to touch that invoice again to mark it as “paid” or to update the details before giving your records to your CPA, everything is ready when you are.

Setting up Chargezoom today is fast and easy – the average onboarding process takes around 3 minutes – and with pricing designed for small businesses, you can start today by saving time and getting paid faster even if your client base is small. Today’s 10 clients can easily grow to 50 or 100 or even 1,000 in a short amount of time but with Chargezoom you’ll be ready with processes that scale. Don’t let a best case scenario take you by surprise – be ready by planning ahead.