Have you developed a consistent collection management program?

Your answer to the above questions is a leading indicator as to how well you collection management is. Se...]]> How long does it take your customers, clients or patients to pay you for the products or services you have provided?

Have you developed a consistent collection management program?

Your answer to the above questions is a leading indicator as to how well you collection management is. Sending an invoice doesn’t always result in payment. Successful collection management s a matter of making your payment terms crystal clear and separating collection management from new business functions, in other words – keep your emotions out of collection management!. You can’t be hesitant or soft in collection management.

Collection management is a sticky subject because it can require getting tough with the very same customers that pay your salary. Many small businesses handle the collection management process in-house, either by having their sales staff with the task of collecting their accounts (talk about playing on both sides of the fence) or by using billing staff that have never had formal collection management training.

Frequently, a business will consider turning over a past-due receivable to a commercial collection agency after it has been outstanding for 90 days. At their core, collection agencies try to get the money owed by using a combination of letters and telephone calls. The are just professional and full time collection management firms.

Monitoring slow-paying accounts and adopting timely and systematic billing practices are just two ways you can help reduce your receivables using collection management.

Collection Agency
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"Debt collection letter" in the singular may be an oxymoron, since unfortunately, one is rarely enough. You should have a series of letters to send to deadbeat clients, each one becoming a little more insistent. Here are some ideas for a five-letter se...]]> Debt collection letters–an overview

“Debt collection letter” in the singular may be an oxymoron, since unfortunately, one is rarely enough. You should have a series of letters to send to deadbeat clients, each one becoming a little more insistent. Here are some ideas for a five-letter series.

Don’t make your first letter look like a collection letter at all. Make it a friendly note. You’re more likely to get money from someone who thinks of you as a partner than a dun.

If that first letter doesn’t get a response–and usually it won’t–send another the next week that’s more urgent and directly asks for the money. Express your concern that you have not been able to contact the client. Ask if he or she is all right, and if he or she is having any trouble paying.
The next week, if you still have not gotten a response, send a letter referring to the payment terms in the agreement you and the client originally made (you did have some kind of written agreement, even if it was just on the back of your invoice, right?). Mention the effect this nonpayment is having on your cash flow, and that your business’s cash flow is just as important as theirs.

Still no response by the next week? State plainly that you are asking for the money for the final time before referring it to collections. Include a copy of the entire agreement between you and the client.

If you still have not heard back from the client, and are confident that you do not simply have a problem with their contact information, call a collection agencyin fact, you may have wanted to have gotten a collection agency from step one (more on that below).

More Tips for Successful Debt Collections

Don’t wait to start asking for your money.

If it’s been a week since the payment deadline passed, it’s been a week too long. Send out that first “reminder” letter today. Don’t hesitate to send these letters as little as a week apart from each other. The longer your bill goes unpaid, the less likely it is you will ever see that money again.
If you’ve been sending email, try sending paper.

For whatever reason, there are people who take a paper letter more seriously. There’s also the real chance that your emails really are not getting through reliably, or are ending up at the bottom of an overflowing Inbox.

If you do send email, make sure it’s digitally signed. A digital signature proves that you sent the email to the specific recipient. In fact, you might want to make sure all your emails to clients and prospects are digitally signed, to have solid documentation of everything you said, and everything they owe.

Unlike with regular emails, the date, time, “to” and “from” fields can’t be forged, so the email has legal standing, even more than certified mail. While web-based email programs cannot send digitally signed email, there are third-party services that will let you send hundreds of digitally signed emails from a desktop email program for only a few dollars a month.

Follow up your debt collection letter with a telephone call.
As any collection agency will tell you, telephone calls are useful if your debtor has ignored the collection letters. But with caller ID, Caller Blocking and voice mail – if people don’t want to take your calls it is hard to reach them. This technique could be especially effective in the case of someone with whom you know will answer their own phone.

Of course, your writing skills won’t go to waste: you need to make sure you have scripted what you want to say. You should take the same attitude and touch on the same points as your letter. Whatever you do, don’t let yourself get sidetracked, and don’t be embarrassed. They’re the ones who are putting you out.

Don’t know your deadbeat’s telephone number? Try looking up the “Whois” record of the business’s website, which usually has the owner’s telephone number.

Does all this sound like too much work?
If you’d rather be writing proposals than collection letters, there are small business collection agencies that will take on debts for as little as $20 each. After all, your client had enough sense to go to you rather than doing your specialty themselves. Shouldn’t you have as much sense when it comes to your debt collection letters?

Steve Austin is a regular contributor to Let No Debt Remain Outstanding (http://www.let-no-debt-remain-outstanding.com/), a website with articles on choosing a collection agency, along with recommended the best collection agencies.

Sending a pre-collection letter.
Hiring a collection agency.
Doing it yourself.

Sending A Pre-Collection Letter

Most businesses don't want to "play th...]]> Here are some sound debt collection techniques that can be followed by businesses to mitigate the bad debt crisis:

Sending a pre-collection letter.
Hiring a collection agency.
Doing it yourself.

Sending A Pre-Collection Letter

Most businesses don’t want to “play the bad cop” with their clients, so they approach a collection agency, which for a nominal fee sends a notice to the defaulter asking him or her to pay up.

Remember, a notice from a collection agency is much more effective than the notice from your company itself. It tells the defaulting customer that you have now hired a professional help to collect the dues and, thus, it increases chances of customer paying up the debt faster. The ‘fear factor’ of credit rating damage is associated with collection agencies.

Hiring a Collection Agency

A collection agency under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act is one that recovers debt on behalf of others. It employs various methods to recover dues from errant customers:

Collection calls are a necessity in debt recovery. Handling the collection call in a calm and professional manner can make the difference upon which collections are made or lost.

Skip tracing is a detection method adopted to find a debtor who has absconded either intentionally or unintentionally.
Forwarding occurs when a collection agency forwards a debtor’s account to another collection agency, possibly because it does not have the authority to conduct business where it is currently located.

Flow Forwarding is a novel concept in which a collection agency contracts with a business to purchase all its bad debts on a periodical basis.
Doing It Yourself

As mentioned earlier, most businesses suffer from bad debts because of a lack of a clear debt management policy. Most organizations would minimize their debt management if they had clearly defined credit policies. Moreover, a clear understanding of the law needs to be had before a business drags its clients to court. This is the tedious bit and therefore businesses need to be very sure with their preparation.

Collection Agency Services offers you a wealth of information on how to select the best collection agency for your business.

Selecting a credit collection agency is perhaps the most important and difficult task. Some factors you must consider while selecting a collection agency are:

- Experience and professionals
- Geographical presence
- Expertise
- ...]]> Step I – Selecting A Collection Agency

Selecting a credit collection agency is perhaps the most important and difficult task. Some factors you must consider while selecting a collection agency are:

- Experience and professionals
– Geographical presence
– Expertise
– Fees and charging model
– Customer references
– Collection Agency Services has covered this topic in depth through various free collections reports and articles on this site.

Step II – Hiring the Collection Agency and Setting Up Processes

Once you select the collection agency, the first two steps you have to take are:

Enter into a contract with the agency;

Set up processes on how you are going to communicate with the agency.

A contract is the legal document and your legal experts will, of course, prepare it correctly. Just make sure that you include important clauses such as confidentiality and non-disclosure. You are likely to pass sensitive information to the collection agency such as your account receivables, customer contacts, product and services pricing, etc. to facilitate faster debt collection. You want to be sure that this information does not fall in the wrong hands.

Setting up processes is a very important step in dealing with the collection agency. The success or failure of your partnership will depend a lot on how well-defined your processes are and how strictly they are followed. Important processes you need to define are:

Internal processes: You have to put in place a clear process on defining bad debt and referring the case to the collection agency. You don’t want to refer the case to the collection agency before you make a sincere effort to collect the dues internally.

Information transfer: How will you transfer the information to the collection agency about your dues and defaulting customers, and how will you receive the information from your collection agency? Debt collection software can make the information transfer process easy and secured.

Third party dealing: As mentioned earlier, it is very important for you to ensure the security of the information you give to the collection agency. The collection agency may use one or more of its associated agencies to get information about defaulting customers. Hence you need to set up a clear protocol on how much information they can share with such third parties.

Communication: You need to set up single point contacts for communication within the company and the collection agency. In debt collection practices, the timing of communication is extremely important and hence it will go a long way in deciding the success of your debt collection process. Again, the importance of debt collection software cannot be overemphasized here.

Step III – Performance Monitoring

Once all processes are set, start monitoring the performance of the collection agency. This is an ongoing process when dealing with a collection agency. Important parameters to monitor are:

Quantitative

- Number of cases referred to the credit collection agency and percentage of cases successfully solved by them.

- Percentage of debt recovered by the collection agency from all cases referred.

- Percentage of debt recovered by the collection agency from solved cases.

- Percentage of amount paid as fees/commission to the collection agency to the total bad debt cases referred to them.

- Average number of days taken by the collection agency for full/partial credit collection.

Qualitative

* How well do the collection agency professionals deal with your customers?

* Has the collection agency followed all legal requirements mentioned in the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act?

* Has the collection agency gone beyond the provisions of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act?

* Has the collection agency followed all processes and guidelines set by you?

Step IV – Contract Closure

Hopefully, the selected collection agency will work best for you. But if it doesn’t, then you need to transfer all your debt collection processes from the agency. You should remember the following important points when you are ending the contract:

Confidentiality and non-disclosure clauses are applicable even after the end of the contract with the collection agency as well as its employees. The collection agency returns all documents related to your business and destroys all information related to your business from their data storage.

Following these simple guidelines will ensure that when dealing with a collection agency that it works best for you and your bad debts are minimized.

Collection Agency Services offers you a wealth of information on how to select the best collection agency for your business.

http://www.collectionagencyservices.net

Although in fact it ended only two decades ago, the era of handwritten or typewriter translations is one that most of us are not nostalgic about - if they remember it at all. To any modern-day translator, versed in - and addicted to -...]]> Practical tips for start-ups in the translation business

Although in fact it ended only two decades ago, the era of handwritten or typewriter translations is one that most of us are not nostalgic about – if they remember it at all. To any modern-day translator, versed in – and addicted to – the cut-and-paste functionality of the latest word processing software, it is almost unimaginable there was ever a time in which translations were produced with a pencil and an eraser, or with a typewriter and correcting fluid. Having said that, there is no denying that the translation process has remained extremely labour intensive.

PCs are obvious and indispensable tools in the modern translation business. The computerisation of our business has enabled us to become far more productive and to produce more polished texts which, thanks to the immense body of ‘googleable’ reference material, are probably also more sector-authentic than our output of, say, fifteen years ago. Even so, not all business owners are aware that in addition to advanced word processing software, a host of other tools have become available to make the translation process more efficient. Here are a few tips.

1. Make sure to get digital versions of as many reference works as possible. Many dictionaries, encyclopaedias and the like are also available on CD. This will save you the trouble of leafing through weighty tomes, and help you find the term you need with a few clicks on your mouse.

2. Get hold of high-quality terminology database software (TRADOS or another reliable brand). Even though it will take some time to build up your customised databases, once they have reached a critical volume they will help you use customer-specific terminology consistently and retrieve it in no time at all.

3. Ask your client about his lay-out requirements. Especially in the case of documents in exotic formats, it would be a pity and a waste of time if you went to the trouble of copying complex lay-out features while your client would in fact, for editing purposes, have preferred a plain lay-out.

4. Try to find out if your client has already produced documents similar to the one you are translating and, if so, ask if you can have a copy. This will prevent you from reinventing the wheel, and will ensure consistency with the client’s existing terminology.

It is interesting to note, finally, that while all sorts of tools have helped us speed up the process, the actual translation process itself has so far not been computerised to any significant degree. Most of the efforts aimed at automating the translation mechanism are focused on reproduction rather than creation. Translation is, and will probably remain for a long time to come, a purely cognitive skill that is performed inside the translator’s brain and that no amount of software can replace.

Fester Leenstra is co-owner of Metamorfose Vertalingen, a translation agency in Utrecht (The Netherlands). After having worked for several translation firms in paid employment, he took the plunge in 2004 and incorporated his own company.

For further details about Metamorfose Vertalingen, visit:
http://www.metamorfosevertalingen.nl
http://www.scandinavie-vertalingen.nl
http://www.medisch-vertaalbureau.nl

Trying to decide whether you need the services of a big ad agency? Here are a few things to consider, before you hand over your marketing plan (and budget) for the coming year.

Big ad agencies are great. In their own little wa...]]> Why a small ad agency may be just what you need.