Our clients who use integrated credit card processing through RW Elephant covert their Proposals to Confirmed Orders an average of 4 days sooner than those using external credit card processing (like Square, PayPal, or other merchant services account).
We also found that orders with initial cash payments took an average of 5 days longer to close the sale than those using integrated credit card processing. Check payments were by the far the longest with an average of more than three weeks longer from Proposal Creation Date to receiving the initial payment.
We looked at the number of days between the date the Proposal was created and the date the initial payment was received for all of 2016 and YTD 2017. Here are the averages we found:
While we can’t conclude whether this relationship is causal or just correlating, here are some takeaways to consider:
- If cashflow is a problem in your event rental business, you might see faster conversions (aka money in the bank quicker) if you encourage credit card payments (especially if you use integrated processing through RW Elephant and online payment pages) for initial deposits.
- If you are charging a credit card fee in order to discourage credit card payments / encourage checks, you may want to consider what that actually costs you in slower cashflow, more employee follow-up time, and potential lost rentals when your inventory is tied up on unconfirmed proposals.
- Developing a more robust Proposal Expiration Policy could help reduce your days-to-closing no matter what form of payment you receive. Throughout the rental industry, 10 to 14 days is fairly typical and many companies have their Proposals set to automatically cancel if a payment and confirmation aren’t received within that timeframe.
