If your business is bleeding money, it is time to look at your payment recovery rate and reassess the viability of your recovery process. Most businesses do not realize how much they can improve with a few critical changes to their operations, especially with a shift to automation. In 2023, businesses will no longer rely on an extensive workforce to uphold their operations. With automation on the rise for all kinds of businesses, it is time that your payment recovery, the most significant part of your enterprise, is also automated.
Now what can you do to ensure your office managers are focusing on their core competencies and not fretting with the convoluted process of payment recovery? You can invest in quality payment recovery automation software. This kind of software is designed to streamline all the processes related to collecting overdue payments. Curious to know how? Keep reading.
The Key Features of Payment Recovery Automation Software
Like a well-built road, payment recovery automation software lays out a route to easy automation with a quick transformation curve and high rewards. Here are some basic roadblocks that become quite easy to navigate with automation:
Communication with Debtors:
Payment recovery automation software has built-in and customizable reminders for overdue payments. The software will generate automatic and regular reminders over a period of designated time to debtors to ensure they are promptly reminded when a payment is overdue.
In most cases, a single reminder will garner a response and the debtor will make the payment.
But in the case that a payment must be chased more, the software will continue to send reminders until they are acknowledged, and the payment is made. There is no need for designated personnel to waste their time calling debtors and chasing overdue payments.
Varied Payment Options:
Every debtor will have their own set of challenges in making payments. Based on their financial circumstances and the mode of payments they can access; they can face issues in making payments in time. To preemptively mitigate this challenge, the software will provide multiple payment options like:
- Online payment portals
- Bank deposit and automatic withdrawal
- Cheques
With these payment options available to the clients, there is no need for an office manager to chase them and determine suitable payment options. The problem is nipped in the bud and readily available payment options are at the client’s disposal.
Escalation to Collections:
With every overdue payment, the possibility of escalation to collections becomes more real. To ensure that this situation can be avoided, the automation software will ensure that a debtor is timely reminded before their account is sent to collections.
Usually, it would take some people to track payments and compile a list of people who are facing collections but automating that process will provide a clear segmentation for the managers to know what to expect when an account is heading to collections, and devise ways to side-step that.
Real-Time Payment Tracking:
Imagine having a sea of accounts in your system that need regular tracking to ensure payments are being collected and processed duly. Now imagine the amount of time and effort that would require on behalf of your collection’s agents and the sheer possibility of error!
If you want to ensure that the greatest amount of your accounts is being collected successfully and there is a clear indication of which accounts are heading to collection, automation is the way to go. The software will provide a real-time tracking service that will keep a record of all the payments collected so businesses are aware of the revenue they are recovering.
What are the Lesser-Known Advantages of Automating Payment Recovery?
Aside from the obvious cost-saving benefits of using automation software for payment recovery, one can also assume that fewer human errors in collection efforts will make a massive impact on revenue recovery. Do not think of it as machines replacing the value of human effort. Instead, it is preserving human effort for enormously essential things like running the primary operations of a business rather than chasing after accounts to pay up.
Your human resources are equipped with competencies to boost your business, regulate workflow, and perform their best to ensure your business is thriving. If you would like to keep it that way, automation software can help you redirect your human resources towards more demanding tasks like customer service. Here are some lesser-known advantages of automating your payment recovery process:
Debtor Segmentation:
It might not seem like a pressing issue but identifying debtor intent is important in determining when and how the payment will be collected. Every debtor will have their own financial circumstances and hence will need curated tactics to recover payments.
Automation software can segment debtor intents and develop quadrants to define the following types of debtors: willing and able debtor, willing and unable debtor, unwilling and able, unwilling, and unable.
This segmentation reduces the time to determine when and how an account will be recovered as collectors can anticipate quickly which account will head to collections and can potentially become bad debt.
First-Party Collection Experience:
Oftentimes AR (Accounts Receivable) management is shipped off to a third-party collection agency. However, with growing concerns around compliance and ethical regulations that come up with third-party collectors, most people prefer to handle AR management in-house.
It is hard to manage the techniques of collection and oversee progress with a third-party collector, but with payment recovery automation software it is easy to get a first-party collection experience without engaging your own workforce to do it for you. The software can provide you with options to use your own brand name to reach out to clients and collect debts.
Scalability of Recovery Systems:
Any time you have more than the fair share of accounts to collect on, your human resources and workforce will face challenges in accommodating them. For a particularly large batch of accounts, payment recovery automation software will not only upload and arrange the claims, but also streamline the entire process so that batch claims can be processed easily.
This allows your system to scale easily between smaller and larger claims without having to add extra hands to the table to manage the increased workload.
Come Over to The Light Side – Automate Your Payment Recovery System!
There are myriad advantages to shifting your payment recovery operation to an automated one. Trust Last Demand to help you streamline your AR and maintain accounts receivable efficiently. While you can always rely on your trusty employees to give their best performance and take on the collections themselves, automating your payment recovery with Last Demand is a wise decision because it is a long and tedious process best handled by software.
It can take the pressure off your capable employees who can improve customer relationships, devise creative strategies to market your business and lend their valuable time and energy to building your brand. The cost-saving and time-saving aspects of automation are a clear win that will enable any business to run better and faster on automation. If you are struggling to ensure regular collections and your revenue is disappearing, automation will go a long way in preserving that revenue and generating value for this crucial investment in optimizing your business.
