10 Ways to Run Your Credit Department Efficiently
Here are ten ideas to help you improve both your personal and your credit department's efficiency.
1. Spend time teaching, coaching, and encouraging staff. They are your most valuable resource.
2. Shop around for the best price on outside services the credit department uses, such as collection agencies and attorneys. Often, with very little effort you will be able to negotiate concessions from the list price, especially on credit reports and with outside collection agencies.
3. Develop your own unique set of free web-based resources to complement your existing credit reporting sources.
4. Don't be intimidated about smart, ambitious subordinates. Surround yourself with people who know as much as or more about their particular specialty than you do.
5. Limit bad-debt losses by periodically updating every active customer's credit file, and by reacting appropriately to deterioration in a customer's credit profile. (For benchmarking data on how often credit professionals are updating credit files, check out the third graphic in our recently released Benchmarking Survey entitled Q2 Covid-19 Impact Survey - Credit Organizations Are Adapting to the Challenges.)
6. Refine your automated order review and approval system so that fewer orders end up on credit hold. This saves your department time that could be better spent collecting, updating credit files, or resolving deductions.
7. Join one or more industry credit groups. The expense of membership should be more than offset by the insights and information you receive at the credit meetings about common customers.
8. Don't spend all of your time working. Credit professionals need to make time to plan, to train, and to study.
9. Delegate as much work as possible to others. Even if it takes a subordinate twice as long or even three times as long to complete an assignment, on an hourly basis the company is probably still better off.
10. When you encounter a problem, ask subordinates for ideas and suggestions.
Editor · www.highako.com