When should I place an account with a collection agency?
At what age should you place an account with a commercial debt recovery agency?
Have you ever heard the expression “low hanging fruit”? It refers to the ease of picking the fruit from the lower branches of a tree rather than thos
e in the upper branches. A comparison can be drawn between collecting money on an account that has aged less than 60 days past its due date and the “low hanging fruit”. You have a much better chance of collecting your accounts while they are still “low hanging fruit”.
We encourage our clients to focus their efforts on collecting their accounts within the first 60 days of aging. Once it reaches 60 days past due, place the account for collection with your favorite collection agency. Placing you accounts earlier will:
The Commercial Collection Agency Association (http://www.ccaacollect.com/index.html) has done studies that illustrate how much more difficult it is to collect an account as it gets older. Download the Age vs Value Calculator and your will find a $20,000.00 invoice is 81.3% collectible once it has aged 60 days. That means it is worth $16,260.00. That is bad enough, but the same account that is 6 months past due has a collectability of only 52.1%, or a value of $10,420.00. The value/collectability of the account is reduced by nearly 30% in just four months. Clearly, an older account is more difficult to collect and more likely to be returned by your collection agency as uncollectible. If you have past due accounts older than 60 days, I urge you to place those accounts now.
Don’t be afraid to demand payment from your customers when the account first becomes past due. What good is a customer if they don’t pay your invoice?
“A sale is not complete until the money is in the bank”