Helping Your Business Recover Small Debts From a Large Volume of Customers

If you have a business that has a lot of customers (high volume), but with low sales per customer, it can be very time-consuming for small business owners to recover debts. Here are some tips to help improve the efficiency of your debt collection efforts. 

Automate your debt reporting

It is usually easier to get people back on track with their debt commitments if you can contact them while the debts are still very small. It is a good idea to keep a good record of your overdue debts and send an initial reminder to people that they are slightly overdue with their payments within a week or two of the debts being due. It is relatively common for debts to accrue for innocent reasons such as a credit card being replaced or going out of date and the payments details not being updated. 

Use technology

It can be a good idea to use a payment software that allows you to make easy contact with your clients, such as being able to send a text message to your customer regularly reminding them of payments that are due. It is also possible to use automated 'robot calls' to leave a voice message for people to chase up debts as they become bigger. This can be a labour effective way to contact a large volume of customers in the same way without tying up staff for a long time.

Involve a commercial debt collection agency

It can be a good idea to use a commercial debt collection agency to help you to organise the debt collection efforts. They have procedures, software and equipment to help streamline collection efforts which means that they are a great deal more efficient at debt collection.  They can help to identify the most effective techniques for your business, taking into account your sector and style of business. 

They are also familiar with the regulatory restrictions around how often you can contact debtors and can ensure that you are not breaking any of these restrictions when you contact your customers. They usually charge either a flat fee per debtor or a percentage of the money that they retrieve.  

If you are a small business with a large volume of small debtors it can be time effective to outsource the retrieval of these debts to a commercial debt collection agency. They are more efficient at debt collection, and outsourcing the task can allow you to focus on your core business tasks.