Unwinding a billing mess due to accepting checks as payment
For our SaaS product, we have accepted checks as a form of payment. Collections and sending out invoice reminders has turned into a mess!
We recently made the decision to stop accepting checks for new customers and are going to try to transition everyone that's paid by check in the past to a Stripe ACH Subscription.
Do any of you accept payment via check?
I found early on that customers 'preferred' particular payment methods - but as you've seen, managing them becomes a pain immediately. These customers would still begrudgingly accept and pay once I switched to simple credit card charge.
TLDR: Offering options adds complexity with almost no upside to you, and customers will use what you tell them if this is the only option anyway.
I feel your pain. It is labor intensive.
On my first web hosting business, back in 1999-2004... I accepted checks and Paypal. Some of my customers are small business (older crowd) and they seem more comfortable paying by checks -- just make sure to send them the invoice, also by mail.... which is the pain part... mailing invoices out.
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For some of my web dev clients, when I send them an invoice, they still pay by check. But these are not monthly recurring.
For my regular clients (monthly recurring), I bill them via PDF, then they direct deposit to my bank account.
On another business of mine, when the order amount is huge, the guy will offer to arrange payment by check (say $2000+ order). I just stipulate I'll only accept his payment it if it's a bank/cashier's check, not personal check, not business check, not certified check. And I wait until it's cleared and deposited to my account, then I ship out his product/order. It's a pain, but then again, I don't get charged Paypal transaction fees which can be a huge amount for a big order.