A professional approach to accounts receivable can have a significant, positive impact on your bottom line. It is about money after all. Involving accounts receivable services can have this effect on your bottom line in a number of ways. For one thing, a proactive accounts receivable management strategy can reduce the risk that your customers end up not paying you. It goes without saying that missing out on revenue impacts your bottom line. But the use of accounts receivable services can also speed up the pace at which your customers pay. And it can improve the recovery percentage. Then as you spend less time chasing your invoices, these are also costs you avoid. Time is money after all. And time you spend chasing arrears is time not spent doing other (potentially more valuable) things. Using professional accounts receivable services also helps you avoid having to go into short term debt. Short term debt is costly in its own right. So at the end of the day the use of accounts receivable services from a profe

Firstly, when choosing to get an agency to do accounts receivable management services, you make the decision not to do it by yourself. Many entrepreneurs do choose to do their accounts receivable all by themselves when they start their business. This often involves the use of a spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. It is plain to see that this approach is often fraught with errors. Errors making their way into the spreadsheet not only result in you making a bad impression, but they can also quite literally cost you. When you charge a customer too little, for example, they may walk off feeling lucky. Therefore, outsourcing your accounts receivables has a few benefits over doing it yourself. For one thing, it helps you save a lot of time. And the most difficult of arrears tend to take up the most amount of your time. This is time not spent doing other things. But the ability to focus and the peace of mind that accounts receivable outsourcing affords you is often also of value in its own right. And that may be harder to put a price tag onto. But it can be of great value to your business to just be able to focus on your primary process.

When going about your accounts receivable by yourself, it can be difficult to strike the right balance between being firm and assertive on the one hand and being sufficiently understanding on the other. It can be difficult to gain a sense of how much flexibility is reasonable or even beneficial for yourself as well and how much would be too much. When a customer is willing and able to pay but has just forgotten to do so, the mere act of reminding them often gets the job done of getting them to pay. When there is a lack of a will or a lack of an ability to pay, however, things tend to become more difficult. This is a domain that accounts receivable professionals know how to navigate like no other. At Atradius Collections we use collection strategies that have proven themselves over time. With these strategies we help bring in your revenue as quickly as possible. And by getting an agency like Atradius involved, you can rest assured that this is done professionally.

The era during which accounts receivable management was all done by hand is behind us. A few decades ago the first software products emerged that helped make life easier for entrepreneurs or people tasked with accounts receivable. The emergence of Microsoft Excel was initially one of the first big steps forward in this area. And it is still used by many. One of the major disadvantages of spreadsheets like Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets is that errors can easily make their way into the data. This means some customers get to pay too little, while others get invoices that err on the other side of the spectrum. Also, spreadsheets often don’t scale well when the organisation grows. Additionally, it can take up a lot of time to enter and to update the data. Accounts receivable automation software like Credit-IQ can help reduce this burden. Credit-IQ reduces the amount of time it takes to track payments and to send out reminders to customers. Then there are several other software solutions that we use in accounts receivable management. Atrium helps centralise the data. It gives you an overview of all your collections activity around the world. Its reporting features keep you up to date with the current state of affairs. Then there’s also Collect@Net: Collect@Net acts as your digital gateway through which you can submit cases; through this portal you can communicate with debt recovery professionals at any given time.

The amount of time that can be saved with accounts receivable management varies from organisation to organisation. In some organisations the time savings can be very substantial. One of the factors on which this depends is the number of customers that you have. If you have many customers, each of which individually represent a small percentage of your total revenue, the time that you can save with accounts receivable management may be larger than when you only have one or just a few customers. The way in which your customers pay also makes a difference. If you operate mostly on a business to business (B2B) basis, then chances are you have to wait for your customers to pay after sending out an invoice. For this reason, the possible time savings are often greater in the B2B segment than they are in the B2C, where customers often pay right when the product gets delivered to them. The fact is that for many businesses professional accounts receivable services like those provided by Atradius can make a big differece. Our services help our customers save a lot of valuable time. Accounts receivable management by an agency like Atradius keeps you from having to chase your customers yourself. This helps you save a lot of valuable time. How much time this is exactly, varies from organisation to organisation, but it is often substantial.

When choosing an accounts receivable management agency, firstly you are well advised to look for experience. There are agencies out there that are fairly new. These agencies may not have the proven track record that you may need if you want to come across professionally toward your customers. Then there are a few ways in which agencies distinguish themselves from others. One things that sets Atradius Collections apart from most other agencies is our international nature. Most other agencies are simply too small to be able to have the international reach that Atradius has. Our collections teams speak most of the major languages of the world. So if you have a customer in another country that is not paying, this may be of particular value to you. But we can help you with non-paying customers in your own country as well. Atradius Collections has been involved in accounts receivable management services for a century. And during this time we have gained a significant amount of experience with collections. This helps you bring down your days sales outstanding (DSO) in an effective manner. And as a result, it will increase your cash flow. In the process you will also save yourself a lot of time. The key is finding an established agency with a good reputation that suits your particular needs.

International accounts receivable is different from domestic accounts receivable in a number of ways. For one thing, your customer may not speak the same language as you do. They may be from another country with another culture. Their culture may have different payment norms, for example. Their country may use a different currency, which exposes you to fees from your bank and to exchange rate fluctuations. And there may be country-specific legal impediments that need to be overcome, such as country-specific laws that make the accounts receivable management process different than it would be in your own country. An account manager from Atradius can help you with these things. We have decades of experiences with cases that bear similarity to yours. In the case of the major languages of the world, we have people who speak your customer’s language. And partnering with an agency like Atradius Collections gives you access to local legal expertise, which may help you avoid costly pitfalls. We have extensive experience with negotiations with various types of parties around the world. And we know how to communicate in a culturally aware manner. This helps facilitate timely payments and avoid unnecessary conflict—or at least limit the impact it has on you.