In an ideal world, all your customers pay you on time. In the real world, however, you need a mechanism to encourage your defaulting customers to pay you on time. One best, proven mechanism to ensure timely payment is - charging late fees on invoices. More often than not, the complexities involved in computing and managing the late fees keeps you away from using it.

Well, that’s no more the case! With Zoho Invoice late fee calculation on invoices can be completely automated and managing it is a breeze. Let’s quickly see how to configure late fees for an invoice, but before getting into the configuration details, let’s take a look at their relationship-

1. You can configure as many late fees as you want
2. While creating/editing an invoice you can associate a late fee to it.  Whenever there is a delayed payment for this particular invoice the corresponding late fee formula will be applied.

Late fees configuration:

Configuring late fees is simple and it just has the following four fields-

1. Name: Unique name to identify the late fee, e.g. “2-percent-weekly”, “10-dollar-monthly” etc.
2. Type: Should it be calculated as a “% of the invoice” or is it going to be a “flat fee”.
3. Rate: Specify a flat fee or a percentage, based on what you have specified for the “Type” field.
4. Apply: The frequency, as to how often the late fee has to be calculated and applied to the invoices.

Associating late fees to an invoice:

While creating or editing an invoice, just select the appropriate late fee in the “Late Fees” field as shown below-

Hope you find this feature useful and it comes handy whenever your customers delay their payments for your invoices.  Try it now and share your comments with us.