One of our new staff has been dealing with credit control.
Some of the responses and reactions from clients have been quite amusing.
Some people seem to be under the impression that paying for services should be entirely optional. I'd love to see how they manage to their grocery shopping with that kind of attitude!
We are currently accumalating a collection of cheques, or to be more precise, photocopies of cheques. Needless to say we prefer the actual cheques to the photocopies.
Why do I mention this?
According to reports and statistics published in a number of places, Irish big business is notorious for not paying its bills in a timely fashion and thus financing itself by unilaterally granting itself long credit periods.
This leads to a "wonderful" catch 22 situation. If SMEs are not being paid on time by their clients their cashflow comes under pressure which means that they in turn cannot pay their suppliers in a timely fashion and so on and so on ad infinitum
Of course this issue is not restricted to Ireland. When I worked in Milan I used to have "fun" doing credit control as well. Some of the largest clients were also the slowest payers.
And what annoys me is that many of the old schoolers think you should be gratefull that you are doing business with them at all.
And dont get me started on getting some of them to sign contracts...A nod and a wink, sure your grand there.
Thankfully i have some lovely clients who keep me sane.
Alan
I know exactly how you feel.
When we were starting out we were glad to be getting clients, however the reality is that if the client doesn't pay regularly or promptly they are not worth doing business with.
Michele (who hopes he's in the "lovely clients" category :) )