Exceeding high expectations
Though the debt collection process typically has several hurdles that must be overcome to ensure the successful recovery of outstanding debts, there are always some cases that throw up more obstacles than most.
This was the case when working on behalf of an Insolvency Practitioner, whose client had recently entered administration and, due to the nature of the business – a provider of market research services to a range of industries across several different countries – there were several other complications that our collections team had to overcome.
The sales ledger was particularly messy, with close to 50% being foreign debt, and difficulties were experienced in obtaining the necessary paperwork, primarily as a result of many of the worldwide offices being closed down due to the administration.
Further, because the business’ customers paid a deposit up front and the balance upon completion of the market research, there were no project sign offs, which led to several customers claiming that services had been invoiced for without being completed. Additionally, to further complicate the situation, some customers had more than one project running with the business and were attempting to offset payments on one project against another.
The Hilton-Baird team therefore had to draw upon all of its experience and investigatory attributes in order to distinguish between those customers that owed money and those that did not, using its multilingual capabilities to liaise with each one and commence the collections process.
The sales ledger exceeded £500,000 so, using a combination of phone calls, emails, letters and summons, the more highly-valued debts took immediate priority in order to maximise the return for our client. Once the larger customers were put on appropriate payment plans, we could then focus our attention on the smaller debts.
Well over £300,000 has already been collected to date, with a number still on payment plans, significantly exceeding our client’s expectations and reaffirming the Hilton-Baird team’s proficiency despite the numerous challenges that had to be overcome.
