Business is looking at ways to cut expenses and consolidate administrative efforts.    Since most accounting departments don’t create any revenue this can be a good area to look at for helping to increase the bottom line.   Now I know that is not what your accounting department wants to hear so keep in mind that I am a big advocate of reassigning personnel and I do have a few suggestions.    Everyone is looking very closely at Accounts Receivable during this tight economy so maybe you focus a staff member that perhaps has too much Internet time on collection activities.   Now in most cases your collector could be or is your Accounts Receivable clerk.  This position could be fulltime in some cases or just a few hours a week.  The first step is to approach collections with a positive attitude.  Give your staff the tools they need to get the job done and how important this job is to your company.  Having the right approach with your staff will ensure that they in turn have a great attitude with your most important asset; your customers and accounts receivable.  

I would not recommend that you have your frontline or customer facing staff do collections.  Keep your service and sales staff totally focused on their jobs of generating revenue and not accounts receivable collections.  Remember they have to keep their relationship with the customer happy and very professional.   Keep collection activity where it belongs; in your administration department. 

Try to be consistent with your message and the timing of your calls and letters without going overboard.    And if you have several people making calls you must make sure they aren’t calling the same customers at the same time.   They should have a very concise list of customers that they call, specific procedures and business rules to manage the list they are calling along with the flexibility and power to work out payment arrangements with the customer.  Staff should always have a manager  to defer any escalations or issues that they can not resolve quickly and under any set guidelines. 

You want to keep your customers coming back but you need to keep a close eye on payment schedules.  

A great tool to use is available with Dynamics GP; Collections Management.      Improve your cash flow and reduce bad debt expense. The clear, customizable information views and automated bad debt management tools provided by Collections Management in Microsoft Dynamics GP help you minimize administrative workload for collections by automating the generation of correspondence, e-mail notices, statements, and invoices to customers, freeing your people for other tasks.

Collections Management is available to GP Professional customers or customers and prospects that are looking at the Advanced Management Suite of Dynamics GP.  We have several customers that use this tool and have found it invaluable to their business.       In fact we have been selling this functionality into a lot of our customers lately and/or training staff on how to use the tools they have already in place to accommodate a more aggressive collection activities. 

Cash Flow Management is another great tool to add or utilize.   Improve cash flow with customizable information views and forecasting capabilities that enable you to monitor, predict, and manage inflows and outflows.

Dynamics GP has many tools in its toolbox to keep you, your customers and your C level staff apprised of cash flow.  Along with Collections Management there is Cash Flow Management, the integration to Office for collection letters or for perhaps a thank you for your business letter or special promotion!

If you care to comment on the information above or have any questions please feel free to contact me at nphillippi@customis.com.