Should Businesses Continue To Tolerate Late Payments?

If there are one thing businesses from all industries seem to have in common, it’s the need to chase late payments long after they are due. 

While this issue affects all sectors, its impact on small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) is especially worrying.

Many businesses have come to view late payments as a necessary evil or simply the cost of doing business. But should this be the case when so many small businesses are starved for cash? 

To examine the impact and prevalence of late payments, Melio partnered with YouGov to poll 1,002 American SMBs. We were surprised to find that while 79% of those surveyed believed businesses must stick to agreed-upon payment terms, 59% said they experience late payments. 

Do This To Prevent Late Payments From Clients

This gap shows that even though most businesses agree late payments shouldn’t happen, many still turn to them as an easy fix. Before we dive into the reasons for late payments.

 let’s examine their impact on small and medium-sized businesses.  

What’s the harm in late payments? 

Since it’s a practice so many businesses opt for, it might seem as if late payments are no big deal. However, 44% of the SMBs we questioned said late payments are a challenge that negatively affects their business. 

The damages include delaying new hires (40%), postponing the purchase of inventory (39%), and cutting employee hours (36%).

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What getting paid on time would mean

It’s hardly surprising that most small businesses surveyed (63%) agreed their business would benefit greatly from getting paid on time. 

Timely payments would allow them to invest in business growth (64%), payback loans (58%), or increase hiring (52%), contributing to the overall health of SMBs, which remain the backbone of the U.S. economy.

Why do late payments endure

While paying late is clearly a flawed solution, many businesses, especially smaller ones, still hang on to it as a lifesaver. To better understand this phenomenon and what can be done about it, we’ll need to examine the two main contributors to late payments: cash flow issues and outdated payment infrastructure. 

Cash flow issues 

Maintaining a healthy cash flow—in other words, making sure more cash comes into your business than goes out—is a delicate dance. Delaying payments may feel like a magical solution as it helps many businesses, small and large alike, stay afloat. 

While this may be true in the short run, when businesses are paid late, their cash flow situation often leaves them with no choice but to delay payments to their own vendors. Thus, a continuous cycle of late payments is created, with cash flow issues being both the cause and the result. 

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The payment infrastructure

Payment infrastructure refers to the acceptable ways businesses pay each other. Unlike consumer transactions, which rely heavily on credit card payments and cash—paper checks are still a dominant business-to-business (B2B) payment method. In fact, as of 2019, checks still accounted for 42% of all B2B transactions. 

This is puzzling, especially considering that checks are also a slow and very manual form of payment. You need to write checks, cut them, stuff them in envelopes, and send them out in the mail, which means days (or even weeks) of waiting to get paid. 

With such a tedious process, it comes as no surprise that businesses have built delayed payment terms into their standard workflows, with due dates set for long after the original invoice date. These soon grew to the standard of net 30 or even net 60 and net 90, in some cases. 

Still, despite these generous extensions, one in four businesses surveyed said they often wait 20-30 additional days past the due date before actually receiving payment. So, is it time to reconsider payment terms?

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The times they are a-changin'

The good news is that payment infrastructure is beginning to change. In fact, the use of checks among businesses has been in constant decline since the 1990s. This is also evident in data previously collected by Melio. 

This decline can be explained by the rise of smart digital payment tools, which allow businesses to better address the causes of late payments and perhaps avoid them altogether. These tools offer easier, safer, and faster payment delivery choices, like a bank or ACH transfers, so businesses no longer need to hear the dreaded words “the check is in the mail.” 

Going digital also helps improve cash flow by: 

Keeping businesses on top of their finances with better tracking options

Letting businesses schedule payments in advance

Supporting more payment options, like credit cards, which allow putting payments off until the next billing cycle

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Time for a rethink

New technologies provide us with an opportunity to pause and rethink old habits. In the case of business payments, perhaps it’s time to start pushing in a better direction. Businesses across the nation should rethink their payment habits and strive for a framework to benefit their own health, as well as the resilience of the entire business ecosystem.

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How To Build A Thought Leadership Strategy?

When you're starting out as a thought leader, know How To Build A Thought Leadership Strategy?

you'll need to put on a piece of paper (or a finger on a keyboard?) how to promote your content marketing. Have a pen. Campaign. the wanted? If you choose to create content to put in the web universe, you may not get as much as you want through a good strategic campaign.

“Leading idea is like singing,” said Don Power, our director of content marketing and strategy. To successfully launch your content marketing campaign, "you need to find the right pitch and style that your audience will learn to expect and believe."

He guides our content marketing strategists on the principle that focus and consistency are key to helping thought leaders impact their campaigns.

Remember, as a thought leader the goal of your content marketing campaign is to establish yourself as an industry expert. If you try to write to please everyone, it won't be so obvious, especially on topics you're not familiar with. 

What is Thought Leadership?

To be a reliable source, you need to improve your content so that it stays branded and appeals to your audience (who are your potential consumers at the end of the day). Now it's time to show it. How expert are you in this field? and went upstairs. So, show through your content marketing what you do best!

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If you're ready to move forward with your thinking leadership, follow these steps when planning your content marketing campaign:

1. Find Your Target Audience

First and foremost, you need to review who is already supporting your business and then consider who you want to attract attention to through your thought leadership materials. Your platform is an extension of your company's brand, so work with what you already have and then research to find out who else will benefit from your shared content.

Here's how to define your thought leadership target audience:

Monitor current and past consumer data Identify general trends in your current consumers to identify other potential consumers

Consider their location, lifestyle, and shared interests to help you assess what the people who support your business would like to learn from you

Conduct consumer research through methods such as polls, surveys, social media engagement, customer interviews, and more to understand more about them and find out what they want from thought leaders in your industry.

Expand your reach to your target audience by becoming an active thought leader through social media and guest posting

2. Choose Your Content Marketing Topic

In addition to defining your target audience, you need to focus your content marketing campaign to be worthy of their attention. In other words, find topics that your target audience would like to know more about. By establishing a set of key thought leadership pillars (about four are ideal), you have provided the guidelines that will base your content so that it remains relevant to your niche industry.

However, pillars are not walls. They don't need to engage in your content marketing, so you're recycling topics over and over again. That's why you should link your column to the general themes or values ​​your business is rooted in and then write content promoting them. Your content will always be on-brand and always relevant to some extent as you provide information about industry topics that always lead to your company.

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3. Offer Information, Not a Sales Pitch

You may be more familiar with creating promotional materials for your products or services. But thought leadership is not about selling. This is a more passive method that will draw more attention to your business and prompt consumers to support it as much as you need.

According to a marketing study, 61% of consumers are influenced by custom content marketing. People will support companies that share information useful to them. If you create content that meets the needs of your audience without openly promoting your products or services, you will see your conversion rates going up.

Your content marketing campaign strategy should be to share important information with your audience. You can include your insights on industry trends, current news, innovations in your field, helpful tips for those looking to climb the ladder, and more. In these pieces, you capture the attention of your readers, engage with them through your content, and give them the opportunity to access your website to learn more or take action. It is a funneling system to engage your readers, share valuable information, and then guide them to your business.

4. Get inspiration from other thought leaders for your content marketing campaign

Take some time and think about the leaders who inspired you in the past. Are there any current ideological leaders on whom you also rely as a valuable industry resource? Consider what they share that has influenced your plot and continues to grab your attention. Do you admire leaders who are factual and concise in their content or who sprinkle some personality there? From other thought leadership campaigns, you can draw on their content to be effective and apply it to your work.

With your content marketing campaign, you will establish yourself as an inspiration to members of your industry community and even to your employees. If you invest thought, care, and passion in your content, you can really make an impact that will benefit your business. 

By associating your voice with it, you will contribute to a dynamic, clear company branding. Many other corporations lack this extra element that will give you a benefit and bring more attention and revenue to the company you lead.

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Led by our Director of Content Marketing and Strategy, Don Power, our team of Content Strategists will do the heavy lifting to help you find focus and consistency in your content marketing campaign.

He assured, "We will personally consult with you to identify your unique strengths and your business values ​​so that we can develop a content strategy that combines your company's brand with your personal voice." At Article- Writing. co, we make you a top industry expert for running an effective thinking leadership campaign.

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Do You Know How To Implement Cloud Migration Automation?

Cloud adoption is now increasing day by day. 30% of all IT budgets are allocated to adopting cloud computing services.

To ensure the cost-effectiveness of such budget allocation, maximize your cloud migration processes through automation. Automating cloud migrations creates reliable, repeatable results across multiple environments to accelerate and simplify the entire migration process. 

Achieve cloud migration automation through a variety of tools to help you automate complex or time-intensive processes such as assessments, planning and design, integration, and deployment of infrastructure. 

Automation is the most reliable way to speed up the migration process while minimizing errors.

Automation-Driven Cloud Migration — An Introduction

Cloud migration automation allows us to migrate complex workloads to the cloud with zero data loss or downtime. Third-party tools can help establish automated migration strategies with full-fledged plans to effectively migrate your workload.

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One approach is to outsource migration to Managed Service Providers who use various automation tools to smoothly migrate applications to the cloud. MSPs create automated migration and orchestration strategies. A test migration is sometimes used to validate these strategies before the entire workload is shifted. 

There are also various software providers that can help you generate migration plans and set orchestration rules. These tools provide information about predictable maintenance windows to keep the migration process almost effortless.

What is Cloud Migration?

Key Benefits of Automation-Driven Cloud Migration 

Automated tools and strategies will make complex migration processes much simpler with automation-driven cloud migration. Here are some key benefits of this automated approach:

Reduce Migration Time

There are multiple processes involved in cloud migration. Each process comes with a set of challenges. Such complexities ultimately slow down the entire migration process and companies often face downtime due to delays. Automation is the only way to swiftly shift the workload without facing any downtime at all.

The automation tools cover up most of the manual processes for your legacy applications. You can then use the saved time to improve data integrity and structure. Moreover, the migration process is typically completed on time without any unnecessary delays due to manual work.

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Lower Migration Costs

Repetitive tasks are often easily replaceable by automation tools and commands. These tools are much more cost-effective than manually repeating tasks, and they can be deployed across multiple environments.

Along with the reduction of cost, the automated migration also accelerates the processes with higher precision and less human error. Therefore, strategic and complex processes are often smoothly covered without any unnecessary iterations. 

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Minimize Business Disruption

Having an incomplete or inferior migration strategy can result in data loss or downtime. By planning strategically and implementing fully automated migrations, with both external and internal live replications, you can prevent significant data loss and allow continuing migration without disruption. Automation solutions work reliably, and they are not prone to human errors that are often a leading cause of system downtime. 

Moreover, such automation solutions are well-versed in handling critical applications as well. They often use test migrations before they move a critical workload to the cloud. This significantly reduces any chances for disruption. 

The Steps for Executing Cloud Migration Automation

Cloud migration involves a lot of manual processes to automate with the help of a reliable solution. Nevertheless, Cloud Migration Automation requires addressing these key steps:

Cloud Assessment & Readiness

Every company needs to assess and analyze its current cloud readiness stance according to its resources and IT infrastructure. This assessment is helpful to analyze whether an organization is capable of shifting its workload to the cloud or not. In addition, such an assessment can be used to specify which workloads for critical applications must be migrated. For more on identifying how to smoothly move your business-critical workloads, check out our article, AWS Cloud Migration: How To Determine First-Mover Workloads.

This process is only partially automated, but there are various tools such as AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) and the AWS Migration Hub that are useful in the assessment stage. 

Design & Plan Migration

Many companies find it difficult to design and implement a migration plan based on their assessments. Workloads, infrastructure, and multiple environments can cause complexity. There are simply a ton of factors that must be considered during this step. Companies often start by establishing a goal of their migration, preparing environments, and implementing DevOps practices. Follow this approach, design cloud cost models, and introduce governance to organize all resources from the beginning. Furthermore, create configuration and deployment plans to develop a complete migration strategy.

Take Action & Build

This is a major step wherein you must start taking steps using a defined strategy. In automation-driven cloud migration, tools help automate the replication of business applications, machine data, and metadata without interfering with the normal functioning of the applications.

Use these tools to then store your data in a cloud-native format using snapshots before it reaches the deployment stage, where further automation takes place.

Deployment Stage

Automated orchestration helps with operational business application deployment on targeted cloud platforms, such as AWS. Many tools also use test migration strategies to perform functional and performance tests for ensuring a smooth migration without any delay.

Lastly, by strategizing your workload migration, you can plan for migrating during predictable windows reducing complexities or human errors. This makes cloud migration cost-effective as well as time-saving for those companies who wish to avoid all of the technical disruptions of a manual migration headache. 

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Summary

Large organizations often go through complex manual processes before they reach the deployment stage of cloud migration. However, follow the above solutions to develop strategies and plan to build deployable cloud infrastructures without wasting resources on ineffective, time-taking and costly processes. 

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