Credit Control Consultancy

Why you should consider me for consultancy.

Do you have a great team of people or an amazing person in your office that makes sure everything runs tickey-boo, your invoices are raised, approved, sent and paid on time? Do you keep on top of your own invoices and have nothing overdue that you need help with, your clients pay on time and no or hardly no debtors? Then the answer is, you don’t need me or my services and I applaud you 100% for this. This is what I would like to see every business to run like. But this is not a reality to many businesses.

Reality in most cases is a debtors list. Business is busy or your building it, getting your brand out there, and any invoices raised are sat, left, waiting to be chased in for payment. Reality of this is that these invoices are not going to pay themselves, and possibly your client could be thinking that the invoice will be ‘forgotten’ and not paid – a freebie. 

Covering Credit Control, you have options. You do it yourself, you employ A.Nother, or outsource.

Employing a person in the office to chase bad debtors means: A.Nother to employ. The expense as you know doesn’t stop there with a salary, you also have costs such as for example insurances, HMRC tax, pensions, sick pay, holiday pay. You may need someone for just a few hours a week to do your Aged Receivables Report and keep on top of it (if you have just asked yourself “what is that?” please get in touch!). Unless it’s someone like me that works using the cloud, or can come in and work from your office on a self-employed basis, employing A.Nother is going to cost you a lot more than outsourcing.

If you have someone in place in the office already and you still have a debtors list and invoices owed from 6 months or longer, it could be a training requirement.  An employee to undertake Credit Control needs to understand and see how important Credit Control is.

If your invoices are being entered on your accounts package, such as Xero, are the invoices being populated fully and correctly? Are invoices being sent out as soon as they are approved? Are there any follow up calls being made prior to the due date?  Is there any contact ever between you/your employee and your clients on the phone? This may seem obvious, but If you want paying on time, this is what needs to be done. Believe me, I have come across people that are absolutely great office and team players, but they are uncomfortable asking for payments, they don’t know how to ask for payments, they never pick up the phone and hide behind emails. You can read all you like, information such as this blog, my helpful resources on my webpage, books about getting paid on time, and that’s great. But the difference in actually hearing and reading the points in a meeting where you or your employee are being engaged and included in discussions can make all the difference. Pennies can drop and the want to do this critical role correctly within the business can be seen. Seeing detailed information about how slow payments can affect a business can really hit home, and hard.   

A few questions for you to think about. How long after overdue do you leave any invoice before you address it? How do you currently handle overdue invoices? Do you have a credit control procedure in place? All of these must be addressed within any business for it to work. If your cashflow is not flowing in the right direction sooner or later your business will begin to struggle and may even cease. I would hate for this to happen. I am passionate that every business should have every invoice paid. I can’t guarantee every invoice will be paid, but I can say with all honesty that if you address credit control you will see a positive difference in your cashflow, increase in your profit margins, cut with your losses you will be a far happier business owner knowing that this is something being taken care of. 

My approach to training and consultancy is nothing but honest and it will make you and whoever needs to be in the room think. I will get reactions out of who I am training what their thoughts of Credit Control are at the beginning of the session, if they feel its important, talk about how they currently address invoicing and credit control and we build from there, looking at process step by step and elaborating what and how things are done.  Then at the end we will revisit these points and see what has been learnt, what has changed, what needs to be implemented.  From you and/or your staff I will get you to look at the full picture and really think and feel about the situations you can be faced with. I do a few moch-ups to get people on the spot thinking and it’s good to see how people are after, when they realise just how vital Credit Control is.

Mob: 07833 453116

Email: info@sbcreditcontrol.com