Getting tired of watching your business tied down by tedious and admin-heavy tasks that cause your collections process to suffer? Watching papers stack up can be comical, but it's no joke when your numbers are inaccurate.

A fine-tuned automated collections process can fix this, providing you with the tools to analyse your company's strengths and weaknesses, and make critical decisions without having to doubt the accuracy of the data.

No doubt your company has a unique system with country specific requirements, but there are common challenges where everybody can benefit from automation.

Below you'll find the undeniable proof you need an automated collections process.

1. Wasting time (hours and hours of it)

Picture this: you spend hours and hours building spreadsheets hoping that you’ll produce something that is both accurate(ish) and up-to-date. You then spend more time manually contacting each customer that owes the company money. This is even before you know if you’ll get paid, and this happens every month.

In summary, you spend countless hours building up the data in a process that is unscalable, unmanageable and is most likely completely inaccurate. What’s the point?

An automated collections process turns this wasted time into productive time. SOLID, for example, manages your entire debt collection process - automated collection cycles, arrears notifications, auto-suspensions and internal blacklisting. This allows you to spend your time on the actual business and growth of the company.

2. The data you collect is inaccurate and out of date

By the time you have gathered the accurate(ish) details of each ‘late’ customer for last month, it will be time to gather this month’s late payments. Having outdated data creates two problems:

• There is a possibility of revenue leakage due to the risk of human error, which increases if each step of your processes is manual. This could mean unpaid payments are forgotten or missed, or that due to inaccurate data, incorrect payments may go unnoticed.
• The second problem is that customer details are out of date. How can you contact your customers for any business at all if you cannot keep up with their contact information?

An automated backend process minimises human error, assists you in keeping track of your customers details, and will keep a record of who is up-to-date and who is not. All of this assists in minimising the risk of revenue leakage. Your employees won’t get lost in the mountain of paperwork you could have without an automated payments system process.

3. Where’s the money at?

Revenue Leakage can break any company - big or small. With multiple spreadsheets and no consistent way to keep track of your employees’ billable hours, it can make the task of accurately billing your clients a nightmare. This is even before you start the collection process for clients that have late payments.

Because an automated collections process does all the backend processes for you and keeps your clients details up-to-date (with minimal risk for human error), you can focus on making those important financial decisions for your company.

4. Database? What database?

You have one spreadsheet for new customers, you have a second spreadsheet for the customers who are paying on time, and a third for the ones who are 30 days behind. Your fourth spreadsheet is out of date as you have had no time to split the customers who are over 60 days behind and those who should have been suspended two months ago. The list goes on and on.

It becomes difficult to track the financial strength of your company, which is dangerous. How can you make important financial decisions when you don’t have accurate data (or any data at all) to base your decisions on?

SOLID’s automated collection process turns a manual, multiple-spreadsheet nightmare to a paperless, automated process - of which its full history is auditable. Having an automated process consolidates all customers in various stages of collections cycles onto a single, scalable system that allows you to track and monitor your company’s finances.

5. Confused customers

The lack of a collections process not only affects you and your employees, it affects your customers too. So when you’re not wasting time manually sending off statements, you’ll be on the phone with frustrated customers who have questions about your confusing billing processes - with questions as simple as,” How much do I owe, exactly?”.

Your customers need to be able to receive their payments and understand how much they owe in addition to when the payment is due.

A collections process is driven by automated workflows that are tailored to suit each company. If done properly, your customers will know exactly what is due and when to pay the correct department/account.

6. No proof?

Let’s face it, no matter how you do it, customers that you have to suspend due to late payments will not be happy.

So when customers who have been suspended come asking you why they’re suspended or claim that you have no proof to suspend them - a collections process should have created and stored said proof in the form of (paperless) documentation and notifications.

An automated process automatically generates invoices, emails statements and sms reminders for customers that have outstanding payments. SOLID’s collection process tracks when your customers’ emails have been sent, delivered, opened, clicked and bounced. This all happens for you and is stored on a single, paperless database.

At the end of the day, you want your customers to pay for the services they have received from your company (on time). Why worry when an automated collections process does it all for you?