Utilising the tools at our disposal
Particularly when cash is tight, business owners will always be looking for excuses not to pay. A lack of necessary paperwork is usually sufficient to delay payment, making it essential to keep everything in order – from invoicing promptly and accurately to detailing your accepted payment methods.
From the point of view of a commercial debt collection agency, purchase order numbers are vital when chasing customers for payment. Without them, our authority can be reduced and it can be extremely difficult to persuade firms to talk to us, never mind pay up.
Hilton-Baird Collection Services was instructed to recover a business’ sales ledger towards the end of 2010 on behalf of one of the UK’s leading banks. Although the majority of the outstanding sums were collected without fuss however, there were a few disputed sums for which the relevant paperwork was unavailable.
But with the help of our IT team, copy invoices and purchase order numbers were found on the company’s servers and were swiftly extracted to provide our collections team with the ammunition necessary to liaise with each individual customer.
It was then a relatively straightforward task to identify which customers owed what and it was only a matter of time before the remainder of the sales ledger was collected in full.
