Although Florida small business owners might disagree with the results, Toronto-based FreshBooks found that the southern state ranked pretty average amongst the rest of the union when it came to being polite.
Ranked 25 out of 50, FreshBooks, a cloud-based accounting software company, based their results on the use of “please” and “thank you” on invoices.
The No. 25 ranking means that only 12 percent of Florida’s invoices registered as polite.
The top 10 states with the most polite small business owners are Oklahoma, Alabama, Ohio, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Minnesota, Texas, and Colorado. The least polite states were West Virginia, New Hampshire, Mississippi, Utah, and Tennessee.
Founded in 2003, FreshBooks compared different invoice payment terms to learn that the more polite the invoice the more likely you are to get paid, more specifically polite invoices increase your likelihood to get paid by more than 5 percent.
According to FreshBooks, politeness not only gets you paid faster but it’s good for your brand and image. The study also found that giving clients 21 days to pay will get the payment to you faster–make sure to use the term “days” instead of “net” in the invoice. It also found that charging interest on late payments is important–clients don’t want to pay extra.
