Waiting on payments from clients is more than frustrating.
It upsets your cash flow, waste time… and more importantly money… and can really jeopardize the long term success of your company.
As a B2B service business I’ve done just about all I can do to speed up payments from clients. I use a state-of-the-art invoicing system that my CPA recently said was “cool!” This allows me to know when clients have seen, and more importantly paid, their invoice.
But seeing an invoice is one thing, getting paid can be quite another…
Commercial debt collection compliance
Do I send out 2nd notices on my invoice?
Of course I do. And I send out gentle reminders to get them to pay their past due invoice. But to be honest more than that is out of my reach, for the simple reason that compliance with collection laws is a serious matter.
I don’t know about you but I work with clients across the country. I literally have clients from Hawaii and Alaska to California, New Mexico, Texas, New York and all points in between. When your clients are scattered across the country compliance with all collection laws becomes an issue that is way beyond my capabilities.
Which is why outsourcing your (and my) collection headaches to a professional collection agency makes sense.
Why outsource?
After all, a commercial collection agency has trained staff in dealing with people who cannot or do not want to pay their bills for various reasons.
What’s more, they have an array of tools at their disposal (like skip tracing) and allows them to assess the ability of the customer to pay by using various data bases accessible only to them. They can also look at the customer’s payment record with your business, and then they can assess the probability of the customer paying by one of the methods that collection agencies use.
The most important consideration is that the Federal laws covering debt collection are complex, and they require many pages to record.
Frankly, this one reason trumps all the other ones for using an outside agency to manage your collection efforts.
Having been sued once before (a long time ago, thank goodness) it’s not a pleasant experience to have a FedEx envelope show up at your door from another company’s attorney. A professional collection agency has attorneys experienced in debt collection who will take a case to court, and they will win if the business has solid documentation about the debt.
Often, the mere threat of court action will prompt payment because the debtor will have far more to pay than just the amount owed.
At the end of the day you have more important items to handle in your business then chasing clients for payment for goods and/or services that you have already delivered! A professional collection agency will take a lot of work off of your hands, and place it into the skilled hands of their collectors, private investigators, and attorneys.
Does that make sense to you?
Find a commercial collection agency today
To find a collections agency that specializes in helping business likes yours, simply request a free services quote from qualified and reputable companies.
Click the link and compare free commercial collection quotes today.
This way you can save time, money and aggravation by hiring a professional who can help you collect some (or all?) of your outstanding accounts receivable.
After all, when you get down to it you really have two choices:
- you can keep doing what you’re doing (and hope for a different result), or
- you can find a commercial collections agency that can help you recover what’s rightfully yours.
Either way it’s your money… you decide.