Smartsheet is a great tool, which can be used to manage many things. I now use it with many of my accounting clients to make sure on bills are ever paid late. It sounds simple, right? Just enter the bill when you get it, and make sure you pay it before the due date.
Until you get a late notice because, when you research it, you find out that the bill never came. Or the e-mail got trapped in spam, or there can be any number of reasons why a bill can be missed, and the payment late. Now late charges are incurred, and then interest on top of that in some cases. My clients really don’t like when this happens.
At one point, I thought to myself that I have to assume I cannot rely on clients, or even the institutions that send out their own bills. E-mail is unreliable. Easy to miss, especially when I get 300 - 400 emails a day! If only I could charge people $1 per e-mail sent to me :)
I decided I needed a more proactive system for making sure that I empowered myself to get the bills and pay them right away. I now use this system for all of my consulting clients, and nothing is ever paid late. In fact, I have a guarantee in my contract based on this, that says, as long as the client has the cash flow to support paying every bill on time, there will never be any late fees or interest charges.
I’ve developed this system for tracking all of my vendor logins, bills, and bill dates, in Smartsheet. Smartsheet is perfect for this, not just because it’s easy to organize, categorize, and easily reference the information, but because the alerts make it very easy to get notified about when a bill is expected to be available. An e-mail hits my inbox (which does not need to be saved). I click a link, login, and then from there in a few clicks I am logged into the service, and downloading, and archiving the bill or statement.
From here I can log into their bank to schedule a payment, or set everything up on Autopay, so I never have to worry about it again.