14 May
2009
14 May
'09
4:32 p.m.
On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 06:35:37AM +0100, Graham Bleach wrote:
2009/5/13 Andy Smith <andy(a)bitfolk.com>om>:
Yeah that doesn't generally happen.
(Sometimes when there is no capacity people do get set up as soon as
capacity is available and then they are billed for it, just to avoid
another round trip of email, but it's an exception to the rule)
It's clear to me that whatever slack is given
it will in general be
what is used by the majority of customers. That is, most people
will leave it up until the wire to pay. If that's going to be
the case then I would rather formally offer just 7 days of credit.
It also has the advantage of not allowing people to drift too far
away before I decide whether to expend much real effort in tracking
them down.
There are two distinct problems here; the people who sign up with
seemingly little or no intention to actually pay for the service and
the late payers. The former can be solved by not giving credit to new
customers. In the case of the late payers, though, how much
hassle it causes you
depends on the payment term. Even if I'm late with every payment for
my yearly plan, it doesn't cause you anywhere near as much pain as
someone who is late with monthly payments 1 in 3 times. Obviously the
discount for yearly payment partly reflects that, but I would suggest
that you consider leaving the credit period as it is for yearly
customers.
It's a fair point and I'll see what I can do that doesn't cause too
much hassle just for being different to the norm.
I'd prefer to use direct debit, since it
doesn't rely on me
remembering to do things, but I will continue to use bank transfers as
long as they are your preferred option. I do wonder if you are saving
money by avoiding paying transactional charges though. It might be an
interesting exercise to work out how much you are paying
yourself/bitfolk to manually reconcile bank payments to customer
accounts.
I'm looking in to it but the only realistic way of doing DD in the
short term is via a third party who are going to add their own
charges on. So it depends what the charges are like; I'd put up
with slightly higher charges than PayPal given that I get to
initiate the payment, but not much higher.
Cheers,
Andy
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