A guide to ensuring your business has necessary policies in place
January is a great time for companies to review their existing credit control and debt recovery processes, ensuring that they are robust enough to enhance the company's cashflow and support growth ambitions.
Benjamin Davies, Team Manager of our national Insolvency and Recoveries team, provides his top tips to ensure that your company has adequate procedures in place to aide prompt payment of your invoices and to reduce the levels of disputed invoices:
- Ensure payment terms are displayed clearly on all invoices and are addressed to the correct legal entity.
- Raise invoices when the contract allows and despatch these to customers promptly, using the agreed method of delivery.
- Have a process in place to identify invoices which exceed payment terms immediately.
- Appoint a designated person within your business to chase invoices as soon as they exceed the payment terms.
- Be aware of any potential entitlement to claim interest and compensation under your contract and/or legislation, if/when an invoice is overdue.
- Resolve any disputes promptly, in an objective and commercial manner.
- Speak to customers who persistently pay late to identify the cause of the delays and whether steps can be taken, by you, to speed up their payment processes.
- Monitor companies who consistently pay late as this could be an early indicator of potential insolvency.
- Review any common issues or trends causing delays in invoices being paid and feed these back to the wider business to reduce issues of this nature becoming commonplace.
- Have a firm of experienced debt recovery solicitors retained who can receive instructions from you to resolve disputes, commence litigation and take enforcement action on the company's behalf.
Benjamin trained with Weightmans and was promoted to Principal
Associate in 2021 in recognition of stellar progression in terms of
both client service and client relationship management.
Clients are consistently impressed by Benjamin's calm and
effective professionalism, with a 'can do' attitude which
leads to palpably improved results for clients. With over 13
years' experience of debt recovery at Weightmans, Benjamin has
acquired a full range of technical and client relationship
skills.
Weightmans' Recoveries team has been providing a specialist
recovery service to private and public sector clients for whom we
have been collecting in excess of £150 million annually for
over two decades.
Our results are achieved by a dedicated team, using a sophisticated
case management system and maintaining the highest regulatory
standards. This has resulted in us receiving consistently high
rankings in numerous legal directories, including being ranked as
Tier 1 for Debt Recovery in the North-West by the Legal 500, and
being named Debt Recovery Team of the year at the Yorkshire Legal
Awards in 2023.
Whilst we are equally experienced in recovering debt from
individuals as well as businesses, we adapt our approach to the
circumstances of each case, especially where our client intends to
maintain a continuing relationship with a debtor. In those
circumstances, our invaluable experience and established practices
enable us to protect the relationship between the parties
throughout the recovery process.
The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.
