Consider this scenario; you have worked for a company who has employed your services on a regular basis over the past couple of years and has always settled your bills in good time, but on this occasion you haven’t had your latest account settled and it is now one month late. You have phoned them to discover what is happening and they let you know that they will be paying their invoices somewhat later than normal and hope to be able to send settlement by the end of the quarter. You have had, what appeared to you as a good client-supplier relationship with this multi national enterprise (MNE) business which is a big name in the area, but their revised time lines for settlement are very much too late for you. You must settle your own bills such as; suppliers for products you had to buy for the work for this business, the wages of the small self-employed group who you brought in to help to provide the service. Also this unpaid account is key to you, but is assumed to be unimportant for the MNE business, and very likely one of many that are also unsettled. So, do you use a Debt Collection business, engage a solicitor, or do you buy a package of information and Debt Collection Software with templates for the Debt Collection Letters and do it yourself?
The last thing you want to do is ruin the relationship you have with the business, so nasty letters and phone calls are out of the question, so what are the choices to achieve this and get your account at or near to the top of the pile?
There are Debt Collection organisations that you could make contact with to do the job, but your experience of these is small and it would result in a trawl through Yellow Pages for whom to phone. Not the best way to find someone you can trust to get your payment made without souring your reputation with the business, and there will be their costs to consider.
You could phone a solicitor and get them to chase the business, but this would possibly work out more expensive than a Debt Collection business and would probably ruin the business relationship.
Another approach that few people may think of for this is the DIY approach, whereby you can purchase the required information and then by way of that, produce a series of Debt Collection Letters that are formal, straightforward and unemotional and follow a known path of the steps required to work towards a satisfactory receipt of the invoice.
The DIY approach to Debt Collection can involve quite a lot of time and effort especially in composing the Debt Collection Letters according to the guidelines in the information pack, then there is posting them off and finally keeping a record of activities in sufficient detail as to be useful should the process proceed into court proceedings. To satisfy these requirements it would be valuable to be evaluating Debt Collection Software which could manage the Debt Collection Letters and the event logging, leaving the user to get on with the postage and entering information such as received letters or better still, the actual paid account.
It is likely that the information pack will be an e-book, which can be used on-line and could be updated as part of the initial purchase. Likewise the same organisation could also have Debt Collection Software available that would be based on the e-book and store the details in a database for later retrieval and printing out.
The costs for such a dual package are likely to be in the tens of pounds region, whereas Debt Collection organisations or legal proceedings are more likely to be in the hundreds to thousands of pounds region, so this is a better path to follow for a small company with limited funds.
RSS FEED
