Nobody wants to be saddled with a ton of bad debt. You don’t want to spend excessive amounts of time evaluating a prospective customer’s creditworthiness either. There’s software that can help with that.
The credit approval process can be a real bottleneck in many companies. References, credit scores, financials – putting all the pieces of the puzzle together can be a major time drain.
Multiply that drain by ten if your credit process is highly manual.
With the current state of the economy, you may well be exposed to more risk than ever before.
It could be the time to think about automating part of your approval process.
An exception-driven system
Think about software that automatically checks the credit history of potential customers. You set the range for what’s acceptable based on how much risk you’re willing to take on at this point in time.
A customer falls within the “safe range?” – automatic approval. Your staffers don’t need to do a thing. Any outliers will be kicked back to you so you can decide whether they:
- are worth approving anyway
- require more information, or
- need another way to structure the deal to protect your business.
It’s not just helpful when looking at customers for the first time. You can use the system to periodically check up on the existing members of your customer database to ensure there have been no major shifts that could spell trouble. (You certainly can’t trust customers will volunteer this information!)
It’s probably worth a look. The companies that have made the switch have shrunk their bad debts down to less than 1%.
