Cashflow and debt management are vital components for any business: bad debts can have a catastrophic impact on the financial viability of any company. Debt collection is an important part of any business, and the right tools can make collection activities more efficient and help companies get paid faster.
A good example of this is one of our consultants earliest consultant roles in the 1990’s, after a successful project he was retained to use Oracle to help the sales and marketing team resolve issues with some of their major clients.
The company’s marketing team were doing a fantastic job of getting these clients to buy the latest products and services. However, the finance team kept putting a stop to these deals, saying that there were major problems with potential bad debts to the tune of £20m.
Upon inspection, the issue revolved around the tracking of payments by temporary members of the finance team. But after 3 months of running reports and consulting with internal departments and the clients the consultant was able to remedy the situation. Managing these debts is reliant on having the right processes and reporting in place to make things efficient and give the organisation oversight. More than 20 years later for some businesses this lesson is one that can still be learnt and implemented.
Fast forward 22 years and the same consultant was party to the following comment from finance staff at a recent event.
“I don’t know which customers to contact, so every day at 8am I am running an Aged Trial Balance and then working on spreadsheets to keep a track of whats outstanding and whats been promised for payment.”
This brings into focus the advantages of automating debt collection using the cloud. We have extensive experience of successfully working with Oracle Fusions, Automated Delinquency Identification, and Work Assignment feature.
As a Collector, users get a Dashboard specific to their needs showing the Customers who have been assigned to that user. With some businesses using up to 30% of an employee’s time identifying accounts that need addressing rather than collecting, there are significant savings that can be made with the right software implementation.
The need to call the client to discuss the collection can also be managed using the assigned work feature, to allow the status of accounts to be updated to ensure reminders are sent to call back in a timely fashion.
The right processes are vital in any business operation. Automating business debt collection using the cloud, using the cloud gives businesses the opportunity to track things efficiently and get paid faster. If your business is using manual collection tracking methods, maybe now is the time to be evaluating if there is a better way.
