When to escalate invoices to a debt recovery agency?

Sometimes, using a debt collection agency is a necessary step to get your invoices paid and one which you'd usually avoid until it is absolutely necessary. This is because it's often seen as having a negative impact on your customer relationships, coming from a perception of aggressive, impersonal collectors that would simply not care about your customers as long as they pay their outstanding invoices.

At Chaser, we believe there is room for a better way of doing debt collection in the chasing workflow.

Most of the time, using a debt collection service arises from an honest business reality that every company is familiar with - the necessity of being paid for your work.

For this reason, we believe it's essential to provide the service to our customers, and do it in a way that does not harm business relationships.

You may ask yourself then, when should I consider escalating an invoice to collection? What are the factors which will make an invoice more likely to be paid? 

Over the past 12 months, we have been collecting payments for our users and gained some useful insights from this.

Days past due

We recommend that you escalate an invoice to collections before it reaches 90 days overdue. We have seen a good rate of successful Collections happen when the invoice is between 60 and 90 days overdue, and this is often due to the fact that it is very likely that the invoice has been chased recently and it takes less time to bring the debtor up to speed with the customer. 

Number of invoices

About 70% of our collection requests involve multiple invoices for the same customer. This makes sense as the case for collecting is a lot stronger when the payment delays are a repeated offence and represent a larger amount of outstanding. From your perspective, more invoices mean more debt and therefore it's more important to recuperate it. From the customer’s perspective, it's more understandable without putting a strain in your relationship.

Invoice amounts 

We have seen clear indications that businesses generally do not escalate invoices below £300. This is mostly due to the effort involved - time is valuable, and teams often believe that lower invoice brackets are not worth pursuing. There are exceptions to this, for example if there are a considerable number of invoices below the bracket, the total could still represent an important amount to collect. 

I have a few eligible invoices, but i'm still unsure if it is the right approach

• At Chaser, we emphasise the long-term development of our users in everything we do, which is why we take a personal and friendly approach to collecting your debt.

• We focus on getting you paid while maintaining and protecting your customer relationships. 

• We trust what we do and our expertise, which is why we don’t charge any fees unless the invoice is paid. No-win, no-fee.

New to Chaser?

Try it for free or book a demo with us and see how Chaser will save you 15+ hours per week and get your company paid quicker.