Consider this scenario; you have had contracts with a business who has made use of your services quite a few times over the past two years and has always settled your bills within the agreed time, but now you haven’t had your latest invoice settled and it is one month overdue. You have been in touch with them to get to know what is going on and they told you that they will be paying their invoices somewhat later than normal and are confident to be able to send payment by the end of the quarter. You have made, what seemed to you as a good business relationship with this multi national enterprise (MNE) client which is a big name in the country, but their latest time lines for payment are way too late for you. You have to settle your own bills such as; suppliers for products you had to buy for the work for this client, the wages of the small part-time team who assisted you to carry out the project. Also this unpaid invoice is key to you, but is no doubt unimportant for the MNE client, and probably one of several that are also awaiting payment. So, do you use a Debt Collection company, engage a solicitor, or do you buy a package of information and Debt Collection Software with templates for the Debt Collection Letters and do it yourself?
The last thing you want to do is sour the relationship you have with the client, so nasty letters and phone calls are out of the question, so what are the options to achieve this and get your invoice at or near to the top of the pile?
There are Debt Collection companies that you could make contact with to undertake the work, but your experience of these is minimal and it would finish up as a search through Yellow Pages for whom to contact. Not the best way to find someone you can trust to get your payment made without ruining your reputation with the client, and there will be their costs to pay.
You could contact a solicitor and get them to chase the client, but this would possibly be more expensive than a Debt Collection company and would be very likely to ruin the client relationship.
Another method that few people may make use of for this is the DIY approach, whereby you can obtain the required information and then with that, produce the sequence of Debt Collection Letters that are formal, straightforward and unemotional and follow a known path of the stages required to get to a satisfactory receipt of the invoice.
The DIY approach to Debt Collection can involve quite a lot of time and effort especially in writing the Debt Collection Letters according to the guidelines in the information pack, then there is posting them off and finally keeping a record of activities in sufficient detail as to be useful should the process proceed into court proceedings. To satisfy these requirements it would be well worth evaluating Debt Collection Software which could manage the Debt Collection Letters and the record keeping, leaving the user to take care of the postage and entering information such as received letters or better still, the actual paid invoice.
It is likely that the information pack will be an e-book, which can be used on-line and could be updated as part of the initial purchase. Likewise the same supplier could also have Debt Collection Software available that would be built around the e-book and store the details in a database for later retrieval and printing out.
The costs for such a dual package are likely to be in the tens of pounds region, whereas Debt Collection companies or legal proceedings are more likely to be in the hundreds to thousands of pounds region, so this is a better path to follow for a small company with limited funds.
