INDUSTRY FOCUS

A Property maintenance company outsourced their credit control to us a while ago due to struggling with overdue invoices. They had previously outsourced their credit control to one of our competitors but due to not understand their business it did not have the outcome they deserved. They then found CCS online and contacted us to see if we could help find a solution for their credit control process.

The Managing Director explained to us how their business worked and shared all the important information we would need to complete our credit control service.

Our client does the work and raises an invoice to the property management company, quoting the works order number, the property address etc. The property management company then fails to pay them. This was a huge problem for them with as much as 80% of their aged debt being more than 90 days old! This is one of the main reason their credit control process was failing them due to how old the debts were and becoming harder to chase.

With further research into our clients account it was found that they only had one sales ledger for all their overdue accounts however, you should always have one sales ledger per overdue account.

For example; A client was appointed by a Property Management business to do maintenance work on the following 4 properties:

1.     Alderley Rd, Beddington
2.     Chatsworth Rd, Debyshire
3.     Ladywell Rd, Lewisham
4.     Congruit Rd, York

Once the work had been completed, what they should do is raise 4 separate invoices on the account of the Property Management business.

In the normal circumstances when contacting a debtor and chasing for payment, you click into their account (in Sage), make your call, and then roll off a list of invoices that you are chasing. Due to the way in which our clients’ sales ledger is structured, it is impossible to do this. There is no way that you can see what is owed. We would quite literally have to click in and out of 100 individual accounts to roll off a list of invoices owed by the debtor.

We have designed and tailored a report within Sage Line 50 that groups all the individual properties by Debtor. Once the report has been run, we export it into Excel and email it to the debtor. The report contains all the information that they require enabling them, to put their comments on the spreadsheet and email it back to us. We worked in a very similar way with a large physiotherapy practice a couple of years ago to manage all their individual debtor claims with Health Insurance Companies.

Our client is happy because there is now some structure to their credit control and they can plainly see that their cashflow nightmare will disappear very quickly.