With unpaid invoices and late payments piling up, your company is suffering from the vagaries of cash flow rather than benefiting from them. And the tense economic climate is hardly encouraging, given that, according to Altares, one in four business failures is due to unpaid customer bills. So how can you strengthen your company’s financial solidity through a strategy of prevention?
Binoculars, zooming in on the customer workstation
Building an effective strategy starts with an assessment of your customers’ risks and opportunities. And customer receivables analysis is a revealing tool. This consolidation of various data relating to your business partners gives you a 360° view of your customer risk(s). In this way, customer receivables analysis becomes your pair of binoculars, enabling you to focus your attention on your customers’ key areas of weakness and potential springboards.
The tripod, the pillar of your strategy
So what data do you need to analyze? The second important step in customer research is sourcing customer information. Internally, you already have many resources to draw on. Your finance, accounting or debt collection departments can consult your customers’ payment history. In addition, your field sales staff can act as early warning systems when they see empty stock or suspect that their customer’s CFO is trying to delay payment. Another sourcing option if your in-house data isn’t enough: companies specializing in corporate information and credit insurance.
If customer research is a pair of binoculars, sourcing will be your tripod to anchor and stabilize your customer vision.
The screw, the link between focus and data
The question is how to organize this multitude of data and transform it into effective tools. With this in mind, credit management software cross-references and consolidates various external and internal data. The result is reporting and statistics on payment behavior and history. This enables your financial staff to better assess the level of risk involved with a prospect or customer. They are also able to determine their customer credit outstandings in full knowledge of the situation. By securing customer receivables upstream, they are able to manage them more effectively, while at the same time encouraging commercial exchanges adapted to the customer’s financial situation.
In this way, your binoculars that focus on customer receivables can be combined with your sourcing tripod, thanks to the screw that is your customer management software.
CashOnTime software, the solution for accurate aiming
And customer management software for your finances is one of our many specialties. Drawing on its 24 years of experience, DIMO Software offers CashOnTime, a companion in the fight against late payment. “CashOnTime gives us clear and simple visibility of our aged balances. These are organized for management by division, region, portfolio, portfolio segment and salesperson,” explains Anita ARCHONTARAS, Credit Manager at DELTA SECURITY SOLUTIONS. At the heart of the software are solutions for credit management, debt collection, litigation, electronic invoicing and lettering to optimize your receivables. “CashOnTime also gives us an overview of disputes and promises to settle,” adds Anita ARCHONTARAS. Added to this is the optimal coverage and connection of all these optimization processes. “Monitoring indicators, such as DSO, are quite detailed. In fact, we have a global DSO but also by division, portfolio and customer, which clearly enables us to target our actions and/or aim for specific action plans,” concludes Anita ARCHONTARAS.
