It could be fair to say that at some period in its existence a organization would be faced with one or more unpaid invoices and would have to either try and recover the debt or write it off. Depending on the size of the organization and the size of the debt, and to some extent the frequency of this occurring, the organization may do their own Debt Collection, including sending out Debt Collection Letters and generally chasing the debtor. A small organization may invest in Debt Collection Software to help them with the process. If the organization is unwilling to undertake this work by themselves then they may well opt to pass the Debt Collection over to a specialist company.
If the organization decides to go down the DIY route then they should do some investigation first to find out what support is available to them in this Debt Collection process, also to try and find out how successful this route has been for previous clients, hopefully with examples of the value of debt and what was recovered. Hopefully in this way they should take up the Debt Collection process with awareness. They should assign sufficient resources of time, money and people to the Debt Collection activities, which can vary from composing and posting Debt Collection Letters, phone calls to taking serious steps such as discussing it with a solicitor if the Debt Collection process has not produced results so far and legal action is needed.
Once the organization has discovered how to do their own Debt Collection they may well find that only a few bad debts require legal proceedings.
The solicitor will require evidence of the organization having undertaken the Debt Collection process to some extent already and this is an area where Debt Collection Software can be a help. There are many such programs on sale but what should be high on the shopping list of functionality is the ability to register key activities and to automatically create Debt Collection Letters. The function to record phone calls as audio files would be so useful and much better than a typed version of the phone call from memory later. The function to produce an activity report which could show the date and time of actions and a short summary of what happened would be very useful in illustrating the chain of events that resulted in the legal proceedings. In terms of evaluating the Debt Collection Software it is useful if a free demo version could be used initially to get a feel for its suitability to the task in hand. These are usually a cut down version which has some procedures disabled from the full version. A cut down version may allow the writing of Debt Collection Letters but may not permit them to be printed out, or it may permit Debt Collection Letters to be printed but may watermark the paper with some text such as “Draft” or “Unlicensed” in order to make the letter useless.
If the organization decides not to use the DIY process they may well try and find a Debt Collection business to do the work for them. In searching for such a company their track record and success rate in recovering debts would be good to know, as well as the obvious question of costs, such as is there a fixed fee or is it a percentage of the debt, or then again is it no win no fee.
