Collection timesavers

RB9 has a set of collection tools to make it easier to stay on top of overdue invoices and handle slow-paying clients. Review this suggested collections workflow to see if you are getting the most out of these tools — and not wasting time doing things manually when you could have RB9 do them for you.

Step 1. See who owes you how much

The RB9 recommended collections strategy starts with going after clients that have the highest amount of old debts first since these have the potential for the biggest payoff. This is why the default Aged A/R report lists clients in descending order of who owes the most for over 6 months.

Contacting these firms first gives you either the reward of clearing old debts off the books with new money in your account — or the nudge to hand these debts to a collection agency or write them off. Any of these outcomes could relieve you of the worry of longstanding outstanding receivables.

In the Aged A/R report you can see at a glance each clients’ outstanding amounts for specific time periods, who is COD, if an account has a collector assigned to it, and the grand total each client owes you. You can filter the results and arrange them in a different order to fit your own strategy. Plus you can export the report to Excel — with or without invoice information — to save or share the spreadsheet.

Step 2. Be prepared with all the info

The Aged A/R report is interactive so you have all of the relevant information at your fingertips when contacting clients. Firm names and outstanding amounts link to their details. Click a firm to find their phone numbers and see any collection efforts you have already made. Click an amount to see the related invoices.

With only these options you could contact clients — but if a client has questions or argues the facts, the Aged A/R report has easy ways to access information to back up your claims and resolve issues in the moment — which smooths the way to getting paid.

Recent payment history

Use the options button next to a firm name in the Aged A/R report to see their 90-day payment history — with a breakdown of amounts paid for which invoices. In that historical report (Receivable Transactions Inquiry) you can click a payment for all of the payment’s details — or click a paid invoice for all of the invoice’s details. You can also search for different payment histories — to find older payments for example — within Receivable Transactions Inquiry.

The client might think they are up to date because they have paid some invoices, so it’s good to have this information at hand when talking about what is still outstanding versus which invoices have been paid.

Complete financial activity

To view ALL of a client’s invoices with their relevant details in one report, use Aged A/R’s Client Activity option. The default of this report includes all of the client’s paid, outstanding, and voided invoices along with current balances and other relevant information. In addition to giving you all of this info, it has an easy Send Invoices function for emailing clients copies of their current invoices — which automatically include any accrued late fees or finance charges. If you want to send a copy of an original invoice, you can do that too with a few more clicks.

Everything at your fingertips

You can keep all of this information open as a series of tabs in RB9 so when you call a client you can answer any questions and resolve any issues on the spot. For example if they say they lost an invoice, you can email them the original or current invoice while you are still on the phone.

Step 3. Contact clients

When you have prepared your collections setup, start contacting your overdue clients using the best method for the situation. Contact strategies for different clients, different jobs, and different time frames could be different too. RB9 has a variety of methods you can choose from for contacting overdue clients.

Send automatic collection emails

For good clients with a single overdue invoice, you might want to email them first with a gentle reminder. RB9 makes this easy with automated collection letters that include all of the relevant information. The Collection Letters option is available for any client listed in the Aged A/R report and automatically lists all of a client’s outstanding invoices and their unpaid balances. You can send a letter for any of the invoices listed or include multiple invoices in a single letter.

Doing collection letters this way gives you letters that automatically include information from RB9. You can choose a collection letter template from the defaults provided in RB9 — or you can make your own form letter templates to use. The template fills in the collection letter’s email message with your boilerplate text and data from RB9 — like a list of their outstanding invoices with basic information included. You just have to add a subject line, attach invoices if desired, and hit Send.

As an initial contact method, sending collection emails is a good practice to establish — they are easy to send out and might be enough to push clients to pay up without a lot of back and forth. You could set up templates for escalating emails to send out at different time periods to clients who still haven’t paid up but the influence of these emails wanes over time so you will want to enlist RB9 to help you use a stronger method:

Call delinquent clients

For clients with more or longer overdue payments — or who haven’t responded to emails — call them while you have all of their information up on your screen in the different tabbed functions. If you haven’t already opened the firm’s RB9 listing, click the firm’s name in the Aged A/R report. Then choose one of the phone numbers in their listing to call and talk about their unpaid invoices.

Since you are prepared, you have a better chance of satisfactory results with these types of phone calls. If they claim they didn’t receive an invoice, you can email it instantly. If they question a charge on an invoice, you can click through to the invoice and see all of the charges so you can explain them. If they say the billing information is incorrect or they have other issues with the invoice, you can make a note in their Collections log in their listing with a reminder to yourself or other staff to correct and resubmit the invoice.

Mail letters

A third option instead of or in addition to the other two is sending RB9 generated demand letters via snail mail. Use the Collection Letters option but this time before selecting a template, choose if you would like to print out a single letter covering all outstanding invoices or separate letters for each invoice. Then after selecting a template, choose Print instead of Email and RB9 will generate the letter(s) for printing.

Because of the extra time and effort involved in printing and sending letters, we generally don’t recommend this method . But it’s good to have this option if a client insists they want you to send them a hard copy before they will pay — or if state laws require it.

Step 4. Record results & set reminders

After contacting a client in one of these 3 ways and while the interaction is still fresh, take a moment to make notes about the exchange and commit to the next step in your follow-up plan — such as the client promised payment by a certain date that you should check for when the day arrives.

This is all done in the firm’s listing by adding an entry to their Collections log. You probably have their listing already open and reviewed previous actions documented in the Collections log. So it’s easy to add a new collections log note, including what action you took, details about the interaction, and the date and time RB9 will send you — or a staff member you designate — a reminder for following up. You can also enter a promised payment amount and the date it should arrive by.

Step 5. Follow up

RB9 will send a follow-up reminder at the scheduled time in Notifications and Messages. When you see the notification pop up in RB9, check this internal message system for the collection follow-up reminder. The reminder includes a link to the firm’s listing so you can see what your next step should be.

You can also find reminders in the Collection Follow-up function. This gives you the option to see all reminders to all staff members — including future and past reminders. This is useful for monitoring your company’s collections progress.

Use Collection Follow-up if you want to follow up on more than one client — you can filter the list for today’s reminders to yourself. Collection Follow-up lists all of the reminders that fit your search criteria and displays each reminder’s information in a grid so you can see at a glance the actions already taken and when, and what should be done next.

Step 6. Repeat

If you have more than one client in arrears, repeat this process with each client. And repeat the process again with any clients who still have outstanding debts after you contacted them until they pay up or you decide to write the debts off.

You can also use the last RB9 collections function — Collection Forecast — as part of your financial health monitoring. If you enter clients’ promised payment information in their listing’s Collections pane, RB9 can use that to project income from collections.

Running the Aged A/R report regularly and following this process will help you stay on top of your company’s financial health and reduce the obstacles to collecting money you are owed.

Bonus tip

If a lot of your hard-to-collect invoices are COD, RB9 has a solution for that. Set up RB Connect for online payments and give COD clients their own RB Connect accounts for accessing their transcripts. This way they have to pay your invoice in full before they can download their transcripts. Once they pay, they have instant access to their transcripts — so everyone should be happy with this arrangement.