Stop Working With Problematic CustomersĬustomers that pay egregiously late on a regular basis will drag down your AR turnover ratio and cause constant problems for your business. Oftentimes a friendly reminder is all it takes to get paid. Use an automated invoicing system to send automatic emails when your customers become delinquent.
A deposit also gets your customer to put skin in the game, which increases the likelihood that the remainder will be paid on time. Take Deposits UpfrontĪn upfront deposit ensures that you’ll receive at least some portion of your total invoice. Offer links to online payment options directly within your invoice and also allow for credit card payments, checks, bank drafts, and more. This helps their payment processes and can get you paid faster. Let your customers pay you however they see fit. Give Your Customers a Range of Payment Options 1.5% interest per month that the invoice is late might be appropriate. If your terms are normally net 30, you might offer a 3% discount for payments made within 15 days. You might also charge a penalty for late payments beyond a certain point. You can offer a small discount to entice customers to pay their invoices earlier than required. Include Early Payment Discounts and Late Payment Penalties This shows you’re serious about your credit collection policies. Send out invoices as soon as the work is completed. In order to collect payments quickly, it’s best to invoice while your work is still fresh in your customer’s mind. For the health of your business, you should try to increase low ratios.
Now that you know your AR turnover ratio, what can you do to improve it? Improving Your Accounts Receivable Turnover RatioĪ low AR turnover ratio can indicate poor collections policies and/or a larger than ideal percentage of financially irresponsible customers. As an example, had you found your ratio was double what it is, or 10.9, you would know that you’re collecting invoices in half the time, or in 34 days. To collect invoices faster, you need a higher ratio. This tells you that it took an average of about 67 days for you to collect on an invoice. To put that in terms that are easier to understand, divide the total number of days in the year by your ratio. This means that your AR turned over 5.45 times in the last year. Your accounts receivable turnover ratio is 5.45. To compute your AR turnover ratio we’ll use formula detailed at the top of this section. And we now know your average AR was $27,500. Let’s say that you had $150,000 in net credit sales for the year.
Computing Your Accounts Receivable Turnover Ratio This shows that your average AR is $27,500 for the year. Let’s say you had $20,000 in AR at the start of the year and $35,000 at the end. You’ll compute this by adding your accounts receivable amount from the beginning of the year to the amount from the end of the year. This represents the average amount of money owed to your business as invoices at any given time. To compute your net credit sales you’ll take your total annual sales and subtract any cash sales, sales returns, and other allowances, such as price changes and discounts. This is the portion of your annual sales that are tied up in invoices. Here’s a bit more information on these two measures. To compute this ratio you’ll divide your net credit sales by your average AR. These numbers are available on your company’s balance sheet. To compute this ratio you’ll need to know your company’s net credit sales and your average accounts receivable.
How To Compute Your Business’s Accounts Receivable Turnover Ratio It isn’t difficult to compute and knowing your company’s ratio will give you a benchmark against which you can judge attempts to collect invoices more rapidly. The AR turnover ratio is a standard metric used to determine the pace with which businesses are able to collect their debts. It’s better for cash flow purposes and saves money and headaches associated with trying to collect delinquent debts. The quicker your business is able to collect on outstanding invoices, the healthier it will be financially.