In Focus Collections
What invoice do you mean?
Sometimes the ‘excuses’ for late payment can be real and it is up to the credit professional to find a solution
Nigel Titcombe Operations manager, PPL
Nigel.Titcombe@ppluk.com
I read with interest Duncan Grubbs article “Would I lie to you?” in September’s edition of CCRMagazine, with his light- hearted review of outlandish excuses for late payment. I was more than a little surprised, in
reading it, that ‘I have not received the invoice’ was not included. I assume that it was only not included because it is not very humorous and is accepted as the traditional excuse for non-payment.
Recent audit Coincidently, at the time, we had conducted an audit on a batch of low-value invoices that were in our aged debt, and ‘not received invoice’ was, as usual, the most common solution to getting these paid. There is no surprise in this, I know that it
has often been the first line of defence offered by customers to justify a late payment, but, upon reflection, I believe this has become a more genuine excuse for smaller businesses than ever before. For speed, cost, and convenience reasons,
more and more invoices are distributed by e-mail. For all the advantages this gives, it has always provided challenges when dealing with smaller organisations, which typically do not have department e-mail addresses, shared mailboxes, or the auto- processing. These businesses often rely on individuals for these functions with individual e-mail addresses. If these e-mails manage to navigate past
the spam or security filters, often the e-mail address is not being monitored due to staff changes, or are missed due to the high volume of e-mails that are received.
January 2018
‘what invoice?’ and incredulity for chasing for payment for an invoice that ‘has not been received’. Although generally an easy objection to
overcome with a swift apology (remember the customer is always right), the check of an e-mail address, invoice resend, and maybe a follow-up call, this has the potential to be a significant cost for businesses, not just in delays in cashflow, but also increased dialling hours. I wish all customer objections were as
Reluctance My perception is that increasingly it is the case that these customers are reluctant to click on links or download e-mails for fear of triggering viruses or a ransomware attack. As a result, today, ever more invoices are
entering this black hole with no hope of payment, unless prompted by a collection call, which is often met with the question
easy to resolve, but my concern is that, if this is an increasing issue, we may, in the future, see scenarios where it is more cost effective to use the post to give confidence that invoices are with customers for payment. I am not suggesting that we are anywhere
near that point yet – clearly the majority of invoice do reach the intended target – but I think we need to be open-minded to this issue.
Coincidently, at the time, we had conducted an audit on a batch of low- value invoices that were in our aged debt, and ‘not received invoice’ was, as usual, the most common solution to getting these paid
www.CCRMagazine.co.uk
More than a perception I do believe that there is more to this than perception. I did a brief check on the volume of copy invoices that we send out on a weekly basis: this showed close to a 5% increase on the same period in 2016. This is a completely bland statistic with
no evidence of correlation to the issue mentioned, but it has encouraged me to monitor and drill down further to understand the reasons. In the meantime, we will continue to
send out copy invoices, with the traditional apology, to seek those elusive payments from customers. CCR
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