Recovery of business debt – are your procedures in place?

As we settle into the full swing of summer, your organisation should be thinking about maximising recovery of business debt by ensuring your staff are following correct procedures and your invoices are pushed to the top of the pile by your customers.  Holidays will soon be underway, and with staff absences for the next 2 months, now is the time to make sure your collections procedures and invoicing is a priority in your business.

See below 3 top tips we have learnt over the years dealing with recovery of business debt for our clients, hopefully you will find this useful and can implemented into your company:

• Invoice quickly – to be efficient in the recovery of business debt, you will need to be fast.  Once a job has been completed, invoice your customer straight away.  Faster invoicing = faster payment. Simple.
• Be clear on payment terms – try and discuss with your customer prior to starting any work how you would like to be paid and how fast (7, 14, 30 days).  We would always recommend 14 day terms as average, because the longer your customer has to pay you, the more problems that may arise in that time, and your cashflow could be impacted.
• Invoice as Notice to Pay – design your invoices so they look like they should be paid.  This is a strange one, but many invoices we see have very little information and this discourages customers to pay them fast.  At the very least you should include: your bank details for BACS, telephone number for Credit Card payment, telephone number for queries, address to send cheques to.

If you are considering the best way for your business to optimise its recovery of business debt, try implementing these changes to your collection and invoicing procedures and you should see more payments, paid faster.

The list is not exhaustive, and there are lots of ways you can improve collections and reduce debtor days.

If you would like help with recovery of business debt or for a no-obligation chat about any of our outsourced credit control services to improve your cashflow, please don’t hesitate to contact us on 0843 309 1633 or email enquiries@tauruscollections.com