Do you have a pile of unpaid accounts by your clients? Are these unpaid invoices affecting your cash flow? Have you been asking for payment without success and are you stuck for how to ask for help?
If the answers to the above are yes, now could be the right time to bring in a debt collection agency to help you recover outstanding invoices, while you get on with running your business. Because if there’s another certainty in life apart from taxes, it’s that chasing unpaid debts is a time consuming business.
If you’re still unsure whether you’d benefit from outsourcing your debts to a debt recovery agency, ask yourself whether any of these resonate with you and you have your answer!
1. Are your attempts to get debts paid unsuccessful?
2. Do your clients ignore your agreed payment plans?
3. Do you spend a lot of time on a few customers trying to get them to pay?
4. Are your clients unresponsive when you try to contact them about payment?
5. Is all of this sapping your energy and your cash flow?
Debt collection agencies are there for a specific reason – to recover debts, so rather than you toiling away for a lot of effort and potentially little result, think about handing over this work to a business who puts an undivided focus on recovering debts – in an efficient and smart way. Here are some of the many benefits of getting a debt collection agency to do work for you.
Portraying a sense of urgency
Put yourself in the shoes of your late paying client. It’s likely they have other outstanding bills in addition to yours. With limited cash flow and a choice of which invoices to pay, who would you pay first? Another request from a business owner or a communication from a respected debt collector? The latter gives a substantial wake-up call to a client, showing them that you’re serious about recovering the money owed to you, and that you’re not going to forget about it. This in itself can motivate people to settle their overdue accounts faster.
Efficient tools and time-saving strategies
Debt collection agencies have a proven toolkit of strategies and methods to make the recovery process more efficient – ultimately, getting your debts paid to you faster.
Constantly evolving technology is a prime tool for debt collection agencies like Guardian Credit Services, whose simple online process makes it easy to sign up and set up your account, with digital smarts behind the scenes that do the hard yards.
And remember agencies have access to databases, credit reporting information and other resources that you don’t, all to speed up the process of your payment. If you translate this time into your own salary, then outsourcing debt collection becomes very compelling.
They’ll do the paperwork
Invoices and debts generate a lot of paperwork. If you’re like most business owners, paperwork will be the bane of your workload and you’d rather be doing anything else.
Debt collection agencies thrive on paperwork! Well, even if they don’t, ensuring record keeping and documentation is key to their process. They typically keep detailed records of any and all contact they have with debtors. These records will come in handy if things need to go further in terms of legal recovery or if you choose to claim bad debts as tax deductions. Guardian Credit Services has over 25 years of debt collection experience, so they know a thing or two about the right paperwork and record keeping.
Prevention and cure
Debt recovery businesses specialise in credit management, so in addition to helping you to recover debts, they can add value by providing advice that can help strengthen your company’s financial position. This can include effective strategies to increase your cash flow, and other resources that can help you, such as how to screen potential clients before they become late payers.
Decision made? Now all that’s needed is to give us a call at Guardian Credit Services to get the ball (and payments) rolling.
