Getting Your Monies Debt Recovery

Post Covid (not that it is yet post Covid) ?every business will be feeling the pinch and some companies will seek to improve their cashflow by restricting your cashflow by paying you more slowly. As a business, it’s important that you get paid what you’re owed by your customers/clients. Late payments, and people trying to avoid paying for goods and services, can be costly to your business and have long-lasting and damaging repercussions.

Here are seven basic tips

1. Invoice as normal

The process for debt recovery should begin with you invoicing promptly and making sure your invoices are correctly issued. Payment terms should have been agreed before any sales or services are delivered so there are no ambiguities.

2. Chase

If it turns out that you haven’t been paid then you should have a process of chasing up the invoice. This could involve you sending additional emails or making phone calls to politely remind the client that they need to pay for the work you’ve completed for them, otherwise the situation will continue to escalate. Here we advise telephone as the first port of call, but a chasing process is a must and make sure you record what you chase and what is agreed from the chase.

3. Credit hold

Do not be afraid of this measure as this is a great prompt. Stop doing any work for them until they have paid their outstanding debt to you.

This is sometimes referred to as a credit hold or administrative hold, whereby work on an account stops due to a lack of funding.

In most cases, this is likely to solve the problem as a business might suffer without the services you are providing to them. However, if this doesn’t result in you receiving your payment then you do have other options.

4. Final notice

The final notice is the last piece of correspondence you’re likely to send the client, before legal proceedings begin. This highlights to them that they have until a certain deadline, which you can decide, to settle any debts with you, before you begin pursuing legal action against them to claim the money you’re owed.

If this final notice doesn’t see your client settle any outstanding payments with your business, then you have different options to pursue when considering legal action.

5. Legal action

Your last resort is to pursue legal action against your customer/client ?if you seek to do it yourself whereby you would probably seek the services of the County court via small claims or if it is over ￡10,000 it goes into a different track; or

6. Debt Recovery

You can hire the experts such as AVC Debt Recovery who will not only seek to pursue your debt, but will give you the advice you require as 66% of County Court judgements never get satisfied (paid). As debt recovery professionals our track record of recovery is much higher.

7. Analysis

This nearly always overlooked once monies have been recovered.

a.??????Did our sales process have enough focus on who was going to pay me and when?

b.??????Was my credit checking process robust enough?

c.??????Did we set out my payment terms?

d.??????Did our terms and conditions stand up when tested?

e.??????Did our overall processes stand up to the test?

Learning from the processes above allows us not to repeat errors. Any business will be lucky to escape without a bad debt, but having issues then repeating them by only focusing on the sales element is not failing to plan it is planning to fail.

www.avcdebtrecovery.com