Trust the Software
The clientele of Voys consists of both large and small companies. In the latter group, consisting of freelancers or start-ups with a few employees, it sometimes happens that there is no money in the bank when Voys collects the phone bill. “That can happen,” says Janneke. “The nice thing about Payt is that the invoice doesn’t remain unpaid for weeks in such a case, but the Payt software detects that the direct debit has failed. If the customer doesn’t realize that the payment has failed and doesn’t manually complete the payment, an email is automatically sent to the respective customer via Payt after two days – fully in our house style. This email contains an iDEAL link, allowing the customer to still pay the invoice. The nice thing is that when a customer uses that iDEAL link, the debtor and invoice numbers are directly included in the transfer. This means we have no additional work; our accounting program immediately recognizes the iDEAL payment and records it under the correct details.”
Automating the Debtor Process
Payt works best if you just let the software do its job, according to Janneke. “Once the process is running, you don’t have to worry about it anymore. You can manually stop or pause the process, but we only do that in exceptional cases. At the start of the collaboration, we determined the process together with the people from Payt: after how many days should the reminders be sent out and what exactly should be included in that correspondence? At Voys, we literally have our own ‘tone of voice’. It’s nice that we can continue that style in the administrative communication with our customers.”
Although the correspondence from Voys is always friendly and informal, the tone in the reminder process becomes a bit more assertive. “In the last reminder, we clearly state that if the customer does not pay, we will start a collection process. We indicate: “Pay your invoice now, otherwise we will be forced to charge collection costs, and that would be a waste of your money.”
If an invoice is not paid, the debtor process automatically transitions into Payt’s collection process. This process meets all legal requirements, allowing Voys to transfer the amicable collection file to a bailiff with the push of a button if the customer still hasn’t paid the invoice after the collection process.
