Our client’s business merged the operations of an acquisition into their existing operations, creating one extremely large organisation 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, however it became apparent that the resource levels assigned to the combined business were not adequate. The aged debt profile on the acquired ledger was already high, and the situation was exacerbated as many of the acquisition’s credit controllers had left.
Our client’s existing collections team had tried extremely hard to reduce the aged profile of the ledger, whilst at the same time trying to control business as usual collections. This became a major challenge and before long the ledger was controlling our the team rather than the team controlling the ledger.
Credit Style identified that the client’s team needed to break the cycle and direct the resources to target more recently due debt to maximise their utility and keep business moving. We then set up a team of aged debt collection specialists which managed all accounts with a balance over 90 days. The collections unit we created operated under the pretext of a sales ledger and credit management review in the wake of the acquisition, helping our agents to gain the trust of 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 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 and account history, leaving our client free to focus on front-end control.
The combined resource 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.
