The Pros And Cons Of Offering Finance
When making a decision about your business, you will always want to weigh up the pros and cons before deciding whether to take action.
Here, we look at the pros and cons of offering finance for both you and your customers. You will also see how PayItMonthly helps to alleviate the negatives.
Customer:
+ The customer can purchase something that they couldn’t have otherwise afforded.
You:
+ This means that not only do your sales increase, the value of your sales may well increase too.
Customer:
+ Because we report to a credit reference agency, paying for goods/services on finance can improve their credit rating, providing that they make the payments on time. This can help to build a good credit history or continue to maintain one.
Customer:
- Customers are often put off using finance as a way of payment due to high interest rates and/or charges.
You and Us:
+ We do not charge interest or fees. The agreement will be for the cost of the goods/service and no more. This is a huge positive for the customer, meaning they are more likely to make the purchase.
Customer:
- Sometimes a customer’s circumstances may change and they find themselves unable to
manage their agreed repayments. This can leave them anxious about what they are able to do.
You and Us:
+ We will always work with the customer in difficult times to get the best outcome for all concerned. We know that if a customer has to reduce their payments for a period of time, it is better to accommodate them and keep some money coming to you than to demand money they simply don’t have, resulting in no payments being made.
You can see here that a negative for the customer can be turned into a positive by using PayItMonthly.
Further positive points for your business:
Offering interest free finance gives you a competitive edge. This will not only have your customers coming back but also have them telling people about you leading to more and more business!
Offering customers the chance to spread the cost will encourage larger sales. You can see more on this here
Offering finance also shows stability in a small business. People will be more inclined to place their trust in a business that they feel is safe and stable.
Now, of course we have to address the negatives too. Below are the negative points about offering
finance. But make sure you read on, because we will tell you how we can turn these negatives around!
Negatives:
There is a possibility that the customer will miss payments.
If a customer does miss payments, you either have to spend time chasing them or pay a collection agency to chase them for you.
Furthermore, if the customer still refuses to pay, you will need to spend money on legal fees to recover the outstanding amount.
Keeping records of customers on finance is time consuming and can get complicated.
How we help:
If a customer misses a payment, we will contact them to get them back on track. We use calls, texts, emails and letters.
This takes three of the negatives away immediately! You don’t have to pay extra for this service, you don’t have to do it yourself and we will do our best to get the customer back in a payment plan.
If for any reason, we cannot get the customer to communicate with us, we can provide a legal service for you. This will be a cheaper option than using a solicitor, though of course you have the option to do that if you prefer. Please see here for more on our legal service.
The PayItMonthly system shows you all of your accounts, the notes on them, the payments, dates of every transaction and is easy to follow and use. So, there is no need for you to worry about keeping your own records as we have them all on our online system, you can simply log in and see what you need to.
So, in short, what we are saying is everything has pros and cons. But when you break it down and the cons can all be managed by using PayItMonthly, offering finance to your customers can only be a positive!
