Following the acquisition of a competitor our clients business decided to merge the operations of both companies into one extremely large organisation in order to gain the benefits of economies of scale.
Redundancies were made in the acquired company and the newly acquired ledger was merged with the acquiring business. It soon became apparent that the resource levels assigned to the combined business were not adequate and the aged debt profile on the acquired ledger was already quite high made worse by the fact many of the Credit Controllers previously employed had left.
Our clients existing collections team tried extremely hard to reduce the aged profile of the ledger and reduce the large 120 day plus balances whilst at the same time trying to control the current items.
This was a major challenge and before long the ledger was controlling our client’s team rather than the team controlling the ledger.
In order to help our client gain full control of the ledger, the key was to break the cycle and direct the resources to target more recently due debt in order to stop the proverbial tap from dripping.
Credit Style then set up a team of aged debt collection specialists and all accounts with a 90 day plus balance were referred to this specialist team. The collections unit we created operated under the pretext of a sales ledger and credit management review as a result of the acquisition in order to gain the trust of the customers and ensure that our clients brand was firmly protected at all times.
The Team we created were responsible for collecting outstanding monies owed and most importantly identifying and resolving any disputes raised. This was achieved by having direct access to our client's systems so that we could self-serve for copy documents etc leaving our client free to focus 100% of their time and effort on front end control.
The combined resources quickly brought the ledger back under control helping to reduce the businesses credit risk substantially thereby removing the threat of being underprovided and reducing overall DSO by some 30 days.