Effective March 1st the Due Date on invoices will be immediate for all customers other than:
- those who have enrolled for Direct Debit
- Managed Interconnect customers
Historically, we have always given Managed Interconnect customers an approved credit limit, and allowed Direct Debit customers 30 days credit. All other customers have had invoices charged immediately to prepayment balances, or taken 24 hours later by card. This has mostly worked well.
Where it hasn’t worked well is for people who favour having no card on their account (and aren’t in the subset who pay religiously by bank transfer), or who prefer a card with no money on it! When we previously raised invoices, we always set a due date of +30 days to allow time for payment failures to be sorted out and we prompted daily about those failures. This gave us 30+ days to sort out failed payments before we got grumpy.
There is an unfortunate correlation between those who have no working payment method and those whose accounts need to stop working to encourage them to pay. It isn’t a perfect correlation and, as mentioned, we’re really grateful to those who choose to pay manually and do so! With those who need things to stop working though, our accounts team endure a tortuous dance of “you sent the mail from the wrong address” etc. etc. and including “stop telling me my card failed, the invoice isn’t due yet”, referring to the artificial due date we added for convenience.
So, to simplify this, reduce the cost for everyone else and frankly to minimise the time wasted on those who will ultimately be disabled (again), invoices will now have a due date of the following day for everyone except Managed Interconnect and Direct Debit customers. This due date will be enforced and thus things will stop working much sooner where accounts aren’t settled!
We’re sorry to those who prefer to pay by bank transfer but given many of you pay on receipt of the invoice anyway, this shouldn’t be much change we hope. Those with working cards saved will also see no change, and we’ll still be reasonable with occasional failures for customers for whom they are indeed occasional. Those with Direct Debit and approved credit facilities (Managed Interconnect) will see no change at all.
If this doesn’t work for you, or in fact under any circumstances if we can persuade you:
- tick the ‘settle from prepay’ box to have invoices taken from prepay where possible, and ensure your account has plenty of funds. We will only take an invoice from your account if we can completely clear it without exhausting your balance at the time the invoice is generated; this avoids a scenario where your balance is reduced to zero and your invoice is not fully paid. Presently we do not retry if you top-up later, so a backup payment option is useful.
- add a credit card to take payment. If you’ve ticked the above mentioned box, this’ll just be a backup in case there’s insufficient prepay credit.
- add Direct Debit to be used as a backup if you’ve ticked the prepay box or on its own without it. If you choose Direct Debit, you’ll continue to enjoy 30 days credit from the time invoices are generated.
Automated payments make all our lives easier so we’d really appreciate it if you could add one.
