How to Quickly and Easily Collect Studio Client Payments
Collecting studio client payments is a critical part of our studio management, and without it we wouldn’t stay in business very long. As important as it is, sometimes our payment processes are complicated or not as streamlined as we’d like. This can ultimately make it difficult for our clients to pay us, can prolong the time it takes to get paid, and can demotivate us from focusing on collecting client payments (also lengthening the time involved in getting paid).
According to Quadient, an client account that is 90 days past due has a 69.6% chance of being paid. The longer it takes to receive payment, the lower the chances that you’ll collect your money due; for example, once that same account is 180 days past due, those odds of collecting payment drop to 52.1%. And over a year of delinquency, your chance of collecting your studio client payment plummets to 22.8%.
As we can see, it’s important to make the process of collecting client payments as quick and easy as possible. With Sonido Software, you can provide a user-friendly way for your clients to make payments.
Payment Gateway
Sonido provides studios with an effective payment gateway where you can configure various payment methods for collecting studio client payments. Many studios that we speak with have more than one way to collect client payments; yes, we like to offer credit card payments, but often studios are taking payment any way that their clients are willing to make payment.
With Sonido, you have the ability to decide what payment methods you’d like to offer your clients. This ranges from Credit/Debit Cards, PayPal, Venmo, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Buy Now Pay Later options, Crypto payments, and more!
By setting up multiple payment methods, your clients are able to provide payment to you in whichever method is most comfortable to them – helping to simplify the payment process through a method the client is comfortable with, and provide payment to you more quickly.
And what’s more, you can automate notification so that you see payment as soon as they are processed. No more wondering if payments have come through or looking through a banking transaction history – Sonido gives you immediate insights through email notifications and within the software application.
Using a user-friendly payment gateway within Sonido helps you and your clients improve the user experience and collect payments quickly and easily.
Payment Receipts – with Balance Due
After payments are made, Sonido can send automated email receipts to your clients with an outline of the payment – including any remaining balance. Not only is this helpful for your clients to keep as a record of their payment, but it serves as a subtle prompt to your clients that they have a balance that is still due, and they need to provide final payment.
Take for instance a case where your client has paid a deposit for studio services. They will receive the email notification with their remaining balance, and they can proactively make the next payment themselves without having to wait for you to send a reminder or share the invoice again later.
These subtle prompts can help your clients effortlessly make payments on a schedule that makes sense for them, with less interaction on your part.
File Delivery Paywall – Self-Serve Payments
In our industry, it’s fairly common that our clients will provide payment in full before we send them final project files. But this can sometimes feel like a very manual or time-intensive process:
- We send the client the files to review
- The client shares revision requests
- We make the corrections and send the files to the client again
- They approve the files
- We send them the final invoice
- They make payment (sometimes after multiple reminders on our part)
- We then deliver the final approved files
Sonido makes this whole process easier through an intuitive systematized process with automation. Not only can you manage the entire audio file review with your clients using Sonido, but you can also automate the process of receiving final audio files through a File Delivery Paywall.
This paywall provides your clients with a self-service option to make final payment on any outstanding invoice balance, and then download any approved files directly. Let’s be real – your clients want access to their final mixes or masters as quickly as possible, and if all they have to do is make final payment and download the files in real-time – without waiting for someone to verify payment and manually send a download link – this can expedite your payment timeline substantially!
Reports – See What is Owed
Sonido Software is a comprehensive studio management system. Much of your daily workflow is recorded within Sonido, allowing you to run real-time reports on your business and performance data.
Using Sonido, you can easily see reports on your financials to answer questions, such as:
- How many open invoices do I have?
- What is the total uncollected invoice balance across all clients?
- Which clients have invoices that are past due? And how many days overdue are the invoices?
- How much revenue have I brought in over a given time period?
- Which projects have brought in the most revenue over time?
- And more…
Using these reports can help you better manage your clients, account receivable, and speed up the payment of outstanding balances through deeper business insights.
With Sonido Software, you can learn how to quickly and easily collect studio client payments. As a system designed for audio professionals, we understand what’s involved in managing a studio business day by day, and we help make the full process much easier.
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