Fourteen Practices, Each Labelled With How Much to Trust It.

They are the design and operating choices that decide whether a business can answer ordinary questions about its own customer payments: what was expected, what was collected, what is still open, what is coming and what needs a person to look. On this page there are fourteen, grouped by how you model payments, what you record, what people see and how you run the operation. They are not accounting practices and not collections practices; both of those are separate disciplines.

Because the items in a typical best-practice list are not equally well founded, and presenting them identically hides that. Some follow from how payment data behaves and can be checked by reasoning. Some are a considered opinion. A few are genuinely contested. A reader deciding what to spend effort on needs to know which is which, and the label is cheaper to provide than it is to omit honestly.

That the practice follows from the shape of the data rather than from anyone’s preference. Recording what was expected alongside what was collected is structural: without both numbers, partial payment has nowhere to exist, and that is true regardless of which system you use or what anyone believes about it. You can verify a structural claim by thinking it through, which is the point of marking it.

Because that would require evidence this site does not have. Bonza Payments publishes no customer names, customer counts, case study results, benchmarks or performance figures anywhere, so a claim that a practice reduces overdue payments or shortens collection time would be an assertion with nothing behind it. The practices are offered on their reasoning instead, which is a weaker claim and a true one.

That depends on the shape of your payments, which is why the list filters. A business with only one-time payments can reasonably skip the practices about keeping history when an arrangement changes and about future payments existing as records, because neither has anything to act on. Select your shape above and the page lists the skippable ones explicitly rather than leaving you to work it out.

Several of them, yes. Obligations have to exist as records before expected and collected can be recorded against them; those have to exist before outstanding, due and overdue become distinct; and forward visibility needs expectations that exist before their dates. The six-step chain on this page sets out what each step depends on. Teams commonly start at the fifth step because forward visibility is what somebody asked for, and it is the step that most depends on the others.

A contested practice has a real cost on both sides. Giving disputes a state of their own is clearly right for a business with meaningful dispute volume and is unnecessary modelling for one without. Showing customers their own payment position removes a category of email and is not appropriate in every commercial relationship. Marking these as contested is a statement that the page does not know your situation well enough to decide.

Several can. Deciding the ambiguous cases in writing, agreeing what ending an arrangement means for an unpaid balance, and keeping the payment position where people already work are decisions before they are features. Others do need the underlying data to exist — expected recorded against collected cannot be adopted by policy alone. The adoption order on this page is a reasonable way to tell which is which.

The practices apply wherever customer payments are managed. Salesforce matters because several of them are about keeping the payment position attached to the customer rather than only to a document, and that is far easier where the customer record already is. The Salesforce-specific design decisions — which object holds what, which states to model — are set out on the Salesforce Payment Guides page.

No. A maturity model places you on a scale, which requires knowing things about your operation that this page does not. The adoption order here describes dependencies between practices, not stages of sophistication, and nothing on the page scores you, asks you to submit anything or counts your answers.

No. No best-practice guide, checklist, template or PDF has been published, so there is no title, author, date, page count or file to offer, and this page does not imply otherwise. The fourteen practices are delivered in full on the page, which means they can be read, linked to and quoted without requesting anything.

Read the structural ones first and check whether your current setup satisfies them, because those are the ones that are true regardless of opinion. Then look at the contested two and decide them deliberately rather than by default. If a conversation follows, the useful thing to bring is which of the fourteen you already do, which you have decided against, and which you have never decided at all.