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Consider this scenario; you have worked for a company who has used your services frequently over the past couple of years and has always settled your accounts on time, but now you haven’t had your last bill settled and it is now one month late. You have contacted them to get to the bottom of what is happening and they informed you that they will be paying their bills somewhat later than normal and are confident to be able to send settlement by the end of the quarter. You have had, what appeared to you as a good working relationship with this multi national enterprise (MNE) customer which is a big name in the area, but their updated time lines for settlement are really too late for you. You have to pay your own accounts such as; suppliers for products you had to buy for the work for this customer, the wages of the small self-employed team who assisted you to carry out the project. Also this outstanding bill is key to you, but is most likely trivial for the MNE customer, and probably one of others that are also unpaid. So, do you use a Debt Collection agency, engage a solicitor, or do you buy a package of information and Debt Collection Software with templates for the Debt Collection Letters and do it yourself?
The last thing you want to do is spoil the relationship you have with the customer, so nasty letters and phone calls are out of the question, so what are the options to achieve this and get your bill at or near to the top of the pile?
There are Debt Collection businesses that you could make use of to undertake the job, but your experience of these is small and it would be a trawl through Yellow Pages for whom to contact. Not the best way to find someone you can depend on to get your invoice paid without damaging your reputation with the customer, and there will be their costs to consider.
You could contact a solicitor and get them to chase the customer, but this would possibly work out more expensive than a Debt Collection agency and would be most likely to damage the customer relationship.
Another path that few people may think of for this is the DIY approach, whereby you can purchase the required information and then by way of that, produce the Debt Collection Letters that are formal, straightforward and unemotional and follow a known path of the steps required to proceed to a satisfactory receipt of the invoice.
The DIY approach to Debt Collection can involve quite a lot of time and effort especially in writing the Debt Collection Letters according to the guidelines in the information pack, then there is posting them off and finally keeping a record of activities in sufficient detail as to be valuable should the process move into court proceedings. To satisfy these requirements it would be worth checking out Debt Collection Software which could handle the Debt Collection Letters and the date stamping, leaving the user to take care of the postage and logging information such as received letters or better still, the actual paid bill.
It is likely that the information pack will be an e-book, which can be used on-line and could be updated as part of the initial purchase. Likewise the same company could also have Debt Collection Software available that would link in with the e-book and store the details in a database for later retrieval and printing out.
The costs for such a dual package are likely to be in the tens of pounds region, whereas Debt Collection businesses or legal proceedings are more likely to be in the hundreds to thousands of pounds region, so this is a better path to follow for a small company with limited funds.
