Collect your sales - Cash is King.

CASH is KING as the media has become so incredibly fond of telling us all these days. More correctly, CASHFLOW is the LIFEBLOOD of EVERY single business and countless surveys by banks and accountancy practices have all confirmed that poor CASHFLOW kills more business than any other single factor.

We know, from long experience, that not every businessman fully understands that concept and so let us try to explain what we mean by the above statement. You conceive of a brilliant business idea, you open your business, you supply the greatest and most innovative product or service that anybody has ever seen, you identify customers and you proceed to sell to them - to their satisfaction as well as yours - BUT your business can only survive if you actually COLLECT for your sales as well as actually making them. Otherwise, whilst your Balance Sheet will look fine with a massive (and even growing) figure for Debtors, your Operating Capital will be used up and you will quickly run out of CASH with which to pay your monthly or weekly bills such as SALARIES or WAGES and SUPPLIERS.

The above might sound breathtakingly simple and totally unworthy of explanation and/or clarification, yet it is truly mind-blowing to discover just how many businesses are totally focused to producing the product or service, selling it, delivering it successfully and to the satisfaction of the recipient or customer, BUT who never spare much thought for the collection of the money then owed to their business. And we are not just talking about small or start-up businesses BUT also about large and long-established businesses who sometimes fail to watch their DEBTORS as closely as they should. DEBTORS appear on any business’s Balance Sheet as an Asset of that business and, as such, are obviously a good thing. However, they are infinitely better as cheques lodged in the Bank Account and thus ensuring the business is no longer exposed to the possibility of NOT being paid.

In today’s climate even long-established and eminently respectable and trustworthy businesses are going to the wall and being forced into Receivership, Examinership, or Liquidation. The traditional Irish attitude of trusting that certain businesses are completely Gilt-Edged and will eventually pay their debts without fail is no longer to be relied upon and EVERY single business operating in Ireland today should be using every available resource to ensure that their DEBTORS are MINIMISED and their CASH balances MAXIMISED.

WE are a family-owned, Limerick-based, DEBT COLLECTION AGENCY and, as such, we collect legitimately-owed Overdue Accounts for our many customers all over Ireland and throughout the whole world, AND we do so every single day of every single week. Our staff are professional and extremely well trained, our initial approach to all debtors is extremely gentle and conciliatory and attempts to find an amicable solution to the problem. WE maintain unbelievably strict CONFIDENTIALITY about both our clients AND their debtors, our integrity is provable by references from literally hundreds of businesses who have used our services, and we DO COLLECT OVERDUE ACCOUNTS every single day - sometimes from the most unlikely of slow-paying debtors.

WE are professional in our approach to both our Clients AND their debtors. WE do our utmost to collect the Overdue Accounts owed to our clients without damaging the business relationship between our Clients and their Debtors and we would even suggest that the introduction of a suitably professional third party (such as ourselves) into that relationship can maximise the chances of the long-term business relationship being preserved, as our DCA can be thus “blamed” for the progressive action being taken while our client absolves himself of all responsibility for the ongoing and relentless nature of our action.

Debt Collection Agencies exist in just about every country around the world and thus the worldwide problem of either slow-payers or even non-payers is not a uniquely Irish one. Ever since the very first pirate discovered that there was a much easier way of achieving his goals than having to put to sea and run the risks associated with all that piracy - in other words by having his target actually deliver the desired goods direct to the pirate and then simply not pay for them - DCA’s have been an essential part of the whole process of trade and commerce, and WE are the only Irish Partner for GLOBAL CREDIT SOLUTIONS (headquartered in Australia) which means that we have Partner Agencies in over 70 countries worldwide collecting Overdue Accounts in over 100 countries worldwide.

Now that we have firmly established that EVERY realistic business should be collecting their Overdue Accounts by whatever Legal means which their debtors make both necessary and unavoidable, the question arises as to why you must use a DCA rather than a solicitor. Allowing for our own natural bias in this matter, it is totally undeniable that DCA’s tend to be much cheaper in terms of benefits encountered for the cost incurred, and we tend to utilise all of our experience and in-depth commercial knowledge to avoid the Courts which can lead to extreme delays and massively expensive and far-from-certain outcomes. Put simply, almost every solicitor will charge for every single whit of their involvement TOTALLY REGARDLESS of outcome whilst DCA’s such as ours tend to work largely on COMMISSIONS chargeable ONLY on successful collection of the amount/s involved.

In fact, we are quite possibly the ONLY professionals who will ONLY charge clients if and when that client has had a successful outcome and, if you doubt this, try telling your doctor that you will only pay him when the pain or disease has been fully cured, or try telling your Accountant that you will only pay him if and when you receive a gigantic tax refund.

So, as a reasonable and intelligent business person, you now accept that you should collect from your debtors in a timely fashion. And you further accept that if you have to outsource the collection process for at least some of your debtors, and you have now been convinced to use a DCA rather than a conventional Legal practice as you prefer to pay for results rather than just for effort, the question now becomes WHICH DCA should I use ?

The following observations might prove useful in making your decision.

1. NEVER use any DCA which is not fully legally compliant and even tax compliant.

2. CHECK for Data Protection Registration and/or TAX Clearance Certificate.

3. CHECK for membership of trade bodies such as the Credit Services Association.

4. REFERENCES from existing clients - such as those openly listed on our website - are the easiest way of verifying that the DCA in question has satisfied clients.

5. VERIFY the overall BONA FIDES of any DCA which you are considering using – we provide a full listing of ALL of our compliances to all prospective clienrs.

6. NEVER pay significant sums in advance of any collection/s being completed BUT do not close your mind to the use of very economical flat-fee based services.

7. CHECK the DCA’s policy on reporting payments and their remittance to clients. We remit to everybody on a MONTHLY basis but larger and more active clients referring large numbers of accounts (or larger accounts) can have their monies remitted on a WEEKLY basis.

8. Do NOT confuse seemingly excellent reporting with any ability to actually collect. Web-based reporting, just for example, does mean that a lot of information about your business’s affairs and those of your debtors is available on the Internet (and thus potentially to all good hackers).

The CHEAPEST option is not necessarily the best and our own Oriental Partners have been known to observe “Cheap Thing No Good - Good Thing No Cheap”.