Business banking – Buying guide

If all customers could be relied on to pay their debts, you wouldn’t need credit control. But since they can’t, you do. Credit control helps boost cash flow and reduce bad debts by ensuring that creditworthy customers get credit terms and that high-risk customers are denied.

The UK market boasts a broad selection of outsourced credit control providers to serve companies that lack an internal credit department. As is true with many other outsourced business services, the arrival of user-friendly software programs has created a middle ground between fully internal and fully outsourced credit control services. Depending on your needs and resources, you can partially or fully outsource your credit control needs.

Credit control software for partial outsourcing

Chasing overdue invoices is another major function of credit control, and if this is your primary concern, several high performance software packages are available to lighten your workload.

• Dedicated databases collate overdue accounts with contact information, calling reminders and “chase” history in a single view to boost your debt recovery productivity
• In many cases the software integrates with your accounting software and registers payment of debts in real time, helping you avoid wasting time chasing debts already paid

Fully outsourced solutions

If you’re more concerned about the creditworthiness of new customers (a very real concern given the dismal economic climate in the UK at present), then you may wish to turn to a full-service credit control services provider which will provide credit reports, risk alerts and payment history data on potential customers.

• Specialist providers work from proprietary databases covering both national and international companies
• Comprehensive reports on potential clients help you determine their credit worthiness based on a complete historical assessment
• Reports include credit rating and limit, group structure, directors information and outside interests, company payment data and CCJ information

Still not sure?

The best way to determine whether (or to what extent) an external debt recovery solution is right for your business is to obtain pricing quotes from reputable specialists. Remember that you will be offered different terms depending on the number of customers concerned, so it is important to obtain more than one quote in order to accurately estimate the cost. You can start right away with the form at the top of this article; just describe your need and you will receive up to four free quotes from carefully vetted credit control specialists within 48 hours.