Customer owes £1,000 - what to do?

hippyadam

bengalknights wrote: »

With all the settlement discount being offered would it not be easier to maybe use a factoring company one of the advantages being that some of them automatically do credit searches so will know the bad debtors straight away.

That's fine and all, but factoring will cost money and further reduce profits. Plus if you get a real bad debt most factoring companies will bounce it back to you to collect (and the ones that don't aren't exactly looking out for your business interests when they try and collect it).

Credit searches can be useful, but with the ease you can set up a ltd company these days they certainly aren't infallible. The art to getting paid is mainly about tightening up your credit limit application process to start with, and knowing what to do if they don't pay to finish...

You can get a really useful free guide to credit control from here http://www.creditsafe.co.uk

On an unrelated note, i wonder if the OP will get anyone else try this on, word tends to spread about companies that don't mess about!

jdturk

end of the following month is a very standard term of business in most sectors and as you say if you refuse there will be other suppliers for garden centres to goto

jdturk

also remember that if they have lots of suppliers they are likely to pay them all in one go, hence the end of the following month where they can do them all in one go rather than mess around doing 3-4 each day

Savvy_Sue

jdturk wrote: »

also remember that if they have lots of suppliers they are likely to pay them all in one go, hence the end of the following month where they can do them all in one go rather than mess around doing 3-4 each day

that is almost certainly why they do it that way. When I was initiating payments at work, I started asking people (individuals not companies!) if they would mind waiting until a Tuesday for me to make their payment, so that they should have it by the Friday of that week. It was much quicker for me to log in to Internet Banking once and do a big batch, than log in every day and do lots of small batches, and to get the cheque book out once and write all the cheques needed and pass them for 2nd signature and then record everything.

But my colleague prefers to check every day and initiate the payments daily, which means I have to authorise them daily. :mad: Fortunately we then pass the details to our bookkeeper who only records them weekly!