Every pest control company struggles with cash flow during the off-season. Bills and expenses pile up, while sales diminish. One solution to address this cash flow crunch is to encourage Customers to PrePay for their services by offering them a bonus. Basically, your offer will be to let them PrePay during the winter months, establishing a PrePay Credit that will be used during the spring, summer and fall seasons. For any payment received, you might give them a bonus, for example, of 5 or 10 percent.
How get the word out about your cool new PrePay program? We suggest a highly targeted message to your customers who have a consistent annual volume. Those are your prime prospects for your PrePay offer. Send it as an email offer to your email customers, and concurrently as a post card to those customers who don’t have email. You will find excellent respondents in each category. Make a goal of 25 respondents for the first year. If you set it up well, your count will grow each year. Many customers will be delighted to be PrePay users and will be better and more frequent users of your services. Everybody wins.
Don’t forget that as your count of PrePay customers increases, your cash flow during the busy season will drop by the amount of the PrePays. But, this is the intent… getting cashflow a few months early. Cash flow loans often come at a cost of greater than 10% and have an emotional cost that is often frustrating and/or degrading in its own way. Don’t go to bank, go to your customers.
When a PrePayment is received from the customer, there is a two-step process.
First, create the payment for the amount of the PrePay from ‘Customer Choose’ >> Credit Tab >> “+” button.
Second, create the Bonus Credit from ‘Customer More…’, then click the ‘Create Bonus Credit’ button. The Bonus Credit is based on the PrePay amount received. For example, if the PrePay was for $500, and the bonus is 10%, a credit will be created for $50. The ‘Note’ field is required when creating the Bonus Credit. A suggested note might be “PrePay Bonus for 2019.”
Encouraging and managing PrePays is another example of why software is critical for companies to succeed. In this case, a simple method of managing PrePays leads to critical gains in cash flow during the off-season. And, historically, companies that fail, fail during these slow months. Protect your business and enhance your cash flow by using PestaRoo’s PrePay system.
PrePays are fully implemented in PestaRoo versions 5.06 and above. Reach out to support@PestaRoo.com for your free update.