Business owners are often far too busy running their businesses to actively chase vendors and customers to pay their invoices, but if you’re not getting paid the money you’re owed, the business will quickly find itself without the cash flow needed to continue, much less grow and scale up.
Knowing how to collect what you’re owed is crucial to ensure the financial stability and success of your business. Here is a guide to commercial debt collections for beginners:
What is Commercial Debt?
Commercial debt is a business-to-business transaction debt collection transaction:
Your business provided products or services to another business for it to be able to provide its own services and now needs to collect payment for it. Commercial debt is a common way for businesses to access capital and product, but it must be managed carefully in order to ensure that the company remains solvent and can repay what it owes in a timely manner.
How To Collect Commercial Debt?
In an ideal world, everyone would promptly pay their creditors quickly and easily, but we don’t live in a perfect world.
If a business is withholding payment, the creditor has several options: they can reach out and offer a payment plan, negotiate the amount owed, or pursue more aggressive methods, such as hiring a third-party collection agency with experienced commercial debt collectors or onboarding a debt collection attorney to collect what they’re owed through the courts. In some cases (like Monetaria), a number of collection agencies have experienced commercial debt collection attorneys on staff, to easily pursue legal remedies if it becomes necessary.
Why Hire a Debt Collection Agency?
There are many reasons to hire a third-party debt collection agency to help you recover your business-to-business debt. They include (but are not limited to):
Experience and Expertise: A debt collection agency has the expertise and resources to effectively collect outstanding debts that may be difficult for you to recover on your own.
Save You Time and Energy: Collection efforts can be time-consuming and require a lot of effort. Hiring a debt collection agency can free up your time and resources to focus on doing what you do best while letting them handle the intricacies of debt collection.
Tactful and Professional Approach: Collection efforts can be delicate and a debt collection agency can handle the process professionally and tactfully to avoid damaging your customer relations.
Ensure legal compliance: A debt collection agency is familiar with the laws and regulations surrounding debt collection and can help ensure your efforts are compliant with the law.
Increase your chances of collecting the debt: A debt collection agency has experience and expertise in negotiating with debtors and has a higher success rate in collecting outstanding debts compared to businesses trying to collect on their own, without the resources and knowledge of an experienced firm.
Selling Debt To A Collection Agency
Another way of handling a debt owed to you is selling and offloading it to a collection agency.
This means you are transferring ownership of the debt from the original creditor to the collection agency, who will then attempt to collect the debt from the borrower and keep what they can collect.
This is usually done when the original creditor has been unable to collect the debt and just wants to get an even smaller sum so they can move on. The sale of the debt is typically done at a discount, with the collection agency paying a lower amount for the debt than what is owed, reflective of their chances of recovering the full sum.
We’re happy you found this article informative! Go back to our blog page to find more tips, tricks and guidance on bookkeeping, to ensure your business gets paid.
If you have unpaid debts that need to be recovered, commercial debt collection may be a good option for your business. A commercial debt collection agency can help you with the process of recovering past-due accounts and provide guidance on best practices for managing accounts receivable.
Led by a team of experienced debt collection attorneys, Monetaria has helped hundreds of businesses recover and collect their outstanding debts and payments. Schedule a FREE consultation with our expert team to see how we can help you recover your money today!