Many business owners don’t realize that there’s a free way to put an extra $1K, $10K, even $100K in the bank: get customers to pay more quickly. At least a dozen strategies exist to do this, but the simplest one is to invoice customers promptly – within 1-5 days of earning the revenue. This might sound obvious, but it’s amazing how many businesses don’t make it a priority to get their invoices out on time.

Most customers will pay you only after they receive an invoice, and the sooner they get an invoice, the sooner they’ll pay you. And when they do, your bank balance goes up accordingly. Multiply that by many customers and you’ll find that on average, you’ll have more cash to run the business.

To calculate how much more, divide your annual sales by 365 to get your average daily sales. That’s how much more money you’ll have in the bank for each day you can shave off the time it takes customers to pay you. For example, for a $365K company, that’s $1K in the bank. For a $3.65M company, that’s $10K in the bank. All for getting paid one day sooner. Every day counts.

Invoicing promptly also helps remove another obstacle to payment: customer concerns – and “concerns” almost always mean a delay in payment. If your customers aren’t happy about your product, they often won’t tell you until after they receive a request to pay. You want to know ASAP if they have concerns so you can resolve the situation to their satisfaction, which has obvious long-term benefits, but also the short-term benefit of getting paid more quickly.

Re-engineer your billing process. Start with the customer receiving the invoice and work backwards to how you do the work, track time, and even make the sale in the first place. Tell your accounting department that you want invoices to be sent within X days of earning the revenue, and ask them what it’ll take to make that happen.

It’s seldom a “big bang” solution; usually, as with most of business, it’s the cumulative effect of many small, unglamorous changes that result in high impact.