How a growing business benefits from outsourced credit control

Requirement:

Challenged with fast business and customer growth, we were approached by this medium sized UK manufacturer with their business needs. One of those being, they wanted the most cost effective, efficient way to manage the increased workload of invoice processing, follow up and order processing, which the growth in new business brought with it. Important to them was keeping ahead of the invoices, providing good customer support and getting paid on time.

Solution:

We began with allocating trained credit control staff, to work solely with their customers. The credit control staff, supervised by a qualified Member of the Chartered Institute of Credit Management.
After a short working trial period we and our client agreed the level of resource to be used each week to achieve the service goals in the most cost effective manner.
Service includes invoice preparation, collection process, payment allocation and order processing. Dedicated phone lines were set up, and are answered in our clients name for us to collect details and pass queries to the right person obtaining the fastest possible response time.

Benefits:

• Immediate benefits included a speedy catch up on a backlog of invoices, which had resulted from the fast growth in business.
• Ongoing benefits include;
• Efficient invoice preparation (deposits and balances)
• Time saving for the financial department through us being assigned certain tasks.
• Service provided entirely in our clients name (calls, emails, letters)
• Absence cover and the ability to scale the service up or down to meet the changing need of the business.
• A positive working relation between our staff, the customers and our client’s project managers, leading to faster query resolution times, improving cash flow.
• A pre agreed escalation process concerning overdue payments from debtors. Debt recovery handed over with all the required details and history gathered by our credit controllers. Dealt with fluidly in-house by our team of debt recovery agents. Where necessary and approved by our client, further escalated to our solicitor.
• Improved debtor days
• Improved cash-flow
• Reduction in payment queries, customer dissatisfaction and complaints
• Low cost