TIPS60 - Administrative fees as a tool to encourage timely payment

Here is another of our videos offering tips and inisights into the business of photography. a transcript of the video is included after the jump.

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TRANSCRIPT:Here are a few thoughts on administrative fees. I'm John Harrington. We deal with a lot of clients who may not be paying in thirty days or even sixty days or gosh, even ninety days. The problem is that all of our vendors require thirty day turnaround. As such, we've implemented and have been using successfully for about twenty years an administrative fee where we pre-bill the client a 10% surcharge and allow them to take it as a discount if they pay on time. This is also a great opportunity, when a client says, ""Hey,I'm a non-profit, what can you do?"" You can say, ""Well we'll give you a 10% discount if you pay on time."" We always pre-bill these administrative fees, however, because unlike the electric company, we can generally not be adding on an administrative fee after the fact to the next bill, because that really doesn't work that way in the client relationship that we have. So administrative fees are a great solution for helping you keep your bills paid on time.

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