Every entrepreneur knows how important money is to running a business. After all, at the end of the day, without money there is no business. Money is to an entrepreneur what blood is to being alive, to being human. It is almost quite literally the lifeline of your business. So when a customer doesn’t pay, he or she is directly impacting your ability as an entrepreneur to continue to run your business the way you have been planning to. Or to run it at all. If enough of your customers do not pay, this can do you in.
In this regard it doesn’t really matter what it is you do. Whether you produce physical products or if you deliver services. Whether you are in manufacturing or whether you deliver the most intangible of things such as recruitment services or being a psychologist and everything in between—you are working hard with the prospect of getting paid. You can get everything right and add a lot of value for your customer, but if they don’t pay, it is all in vain.
There are of course differences in how people pay. When dealing with consumers, private citizens,, life is often a lot easier. There are of course other things that are difficult when dealing with customers, but chasing payments typically isn’t one of them. You just make them pay as they place the order on your website. Or if you run say a shop or a bar, a restaurant, or say a hair salon, then you make them pay at the end of their visit. Simple as things could be. Of course you can then also run into situations where someone finds himself unable to pay, but this is embarrassing to say the least. So it’s quite rare for something like this to happen. People tend to avoid ending up in situations like that.
If you have a website things are much easier. It depends a bit on the country you are in of course. In the UK and the rest of the English speaking world of course credit cards have traditionally been the dominant means of payment online, although a significant minority of people will nowadays pay using Paypal. In other countries these things are a bit different. In Germany most people pay using SOFORT in Germany. In France it’s Carte Bancaire. In the Netherlands for example it’s iDeal. And most Western European systems have their own system. But it’s all the same concept essentially. They pay you right as they place the order. Same thing with Apple Pay or Google Pay, which continue to grow year on year in terms of how much they’re used. The percentages you have to pay the company that takes care of the transaction differs a bit. American Express is of course notorious for charging the highest of fees. But the most important thing is: you are getting paid straight away. This makes your life a lot easier when dealing with consumers straight away.
But with B2B (business to business) customers, things can be quite a bit more difficult. For one thing, the amounts you are talking about tend to be much larger with B2B transactions. Great thing, you would say. And that is true. Unless if the customer doesn’t pay. Then all that seemed so positive turned wholly negative all of a sudden. A big amount that you were thinking to rake in risks becoming a big loss all of a sudden. And with business customers, you often only send out the invoice later.
Unfortunately, there is always a percentage that does not pay on time. And there are always some who don’t pay at all. People who can’t pay. Or people who will push things so far as they can to avoid paying, hoping you will let them get away with it. In advance you never know who is gonna be who. Surely many entrepreneurs reading this can relate to that sense of frustration that grows and grows and grows. The waiting in itself can drive a man (or a woman) insane. Then you don’t just have to wait, you need to act: you need to send out reminders. And then you have to wait again. The uncertainty about whether the money will come in can drive the sanest among us to a place they never thought they’d be able to go to. The stress and the uncertainty can weigh heavily on any entrepreneur.
Of course you don’t show this. You have to remain civil and professional. Toward your customers. And especially when you have employees near you who rely on you for the wherewithall they need to pay their own bills. But it’s very understandable if you feel disappointed when you really felt you had a personal connection with someone. It can be quite stressful and frankly quite upsetting when clients break the trust by ghosting you… when they were really supposed to be paying you. For work you did for them.
The relief called accounts receivable services
Many entrepreneurs, as their business grows, realize that at a certain points they can’t do it all by yourself anymore. You need employees. And sometimes your employees can’t do everything for you either. For example, when dealing with non-paying clients who don’t speak English, how likely is it that your employee both speaks the language of some faraway land and is also familiar with the legal system of that country? I would say it’s either very close to or exactly 0%. So for these things you need accounts receivable services. And of course, this is a whole world in and of itself. As it the case with many things once you start digging deeper.
An important distinction here as well is that between B2B and B2C. B2B accounts receivable services are a world apart from B2C accounts receivable services. And there are accounts receivable service agencies of vastly different sizes. There are just self-employed people out there who have a website to make things seem much bigger than it actually is. And there are multinational corporations. I worked with a Dutch multinational: Atradius Collections. When having to choose between the two, most people would probably choose the latter, unless if that one self-employed individual had lots of raving reviews across the board on all the review platforms perhaps.
Atradius Collections
One of the things that make these large accounts receivable service multinationals like Atradius Collections stand out is the fact that they have offices all around the world. So they have employees all around the world. Employees who speak lots of languages. So no matter what language it is your client speaks, there’s a good chance they speak it as well. That makes matters so much easier. They can just call up your client and speak to them.
In a lot of cases this ability to just speak to a debtor makes a marked difference. But in the cases where it does not prevent things from going legal, the good news is that when you choose a large accounts receivable services multinational like Atradius Collections, that they have people who are familiar with the legal system in the host country (the country where your debtor is from) as well.
How Credit-IQ can work wonders for your day-to-day management
An account manager with Atradius Collections recommended their accounts receivable software, Credit-IQ. This tool has truly been a lifesaver. Cause all of these chores relating to accounts receivable services can take up so much of your time. Credit-IQ does all of that for you. It automates so much of the time-wasting, and quite frankly bothersome, follow-up process. The software automatically sends out payment reminders for you. It tracks if the payment has come in, and if not, it automatically reminds your customer that they still need to pay. How easy is that?
There’s a lot to like about Credit-IQ. The software integrates easily with pretty much all of the major bookkeeping platforms. A wide range of languages are supported, so if you have customers who live abroad that is wonderful as well. It can speed up the collections process by so much. Where it used to take up months before you’d get paid, it’s now a matter of weeks or even days sometimes.
