Video Transcript
It’s an unfortunate reality of business today that if you make sales on credit terms from time to time, one or more of your customers will go bust owing you money. Depending on the size of the amount that’s owed to you at the time they go bust on what that amount is as a percentage of your overall debtor ledger, will determine the impact on your business, which could either be minor or it could in fact, lead to the collapse of your own business. So clearly, management of debtors and bad debts is critical to the success of any business. So what are the four options that we have to manage bad debts. One, make cash sales only. Unfortunately, probably not a commercial reality that you could do that because your customers could simply go up the road to one of your competitors. That is offering credit terms and offering credit terms is part of business today. Two, closely manage your debtors so that if any invoices do go past due date without a satisfactory reason that you put that customer immediately on either stop order or cash sales only for future sales. And that’s fine for future sales, but the invoices that you’ve already got exposed to that customer will still be potentially at risk. Three, purchase your own debtor insurance policy. Again, that’s fine it will protect you in the event of insolvency of one of your debtors. But the problem with that is that you’ve got to buy an annual policy based on your annual turnover for all of your customers, including your good credit customers, which you may not want or may not need trade credit insurance for which you’re paying a premium on. Or four, utilise a OptiPay invoice funding facility that will not only bring forward the cash that’s owed to you by your customers as soon as you make that sale, so that you can use that cash within your business to drive further growth, but it also has trade credit insurance built-in facility offering. So that should one of your customers have an insolvency event, you are protected.
