Transcript: With the rise of the modern family, the request to split payments is on the rise.
You may have divorced parents looking to split payments for their children. Maybe they’re not divorced but decided to split all family expenses down the middle, hey that’s a growing trend. You can have family members like a grandparent sponsoring your child’s SAT prep. There could be customers going through financial hardship and asking to pay in installments. There could be endless reasons why your customers present you with these special payment requests. So what are your options as a small business owner?
Option #1 You could say “no” and tell them to figure it out on their own and pay the bill in full. Now if you’re running a business with a huge waitlist of clients and accommodating your customer’s needs is not a top priority, option #1 might be ok. But if you do want to accommodate your customer’s payment needs, you may want to entertain
Option #2 Which is to say YES and handle it manually. Manually associate the payments received on the child level and roll the child under the household, which is also the invoice level. This is very critical because it will keep your books clean in case there are multiple children under the same household paying for your services.
- You can use Excel, or Google Sheets to manage the invoice split and capture partial payments collected.
- It does require administrative oversight to ensure that the full balance has been paid by the respective parties
- You should be prepared to assume the role of a bill collector if the account was short
Sounds complicated? Well if you are open to leveraging technology and you cringe at the thought of so much manual work and the possibility of human errors, then you might consider option # 3 which is to outsource to a family-centric payment platform like Finli. Finli is built for small businesses struggling to manage these types of special requests that are becoming more and more common.
