A client who we had been acting for had recently acquired a company who did substantial work abroad and approached us to assist them in recovering foreign debts

The client’s credit control operation had no previous experience in collecting from foreign companies and their initial thoughts were to write debts off rather than incur costs in pursuing the debts.

We were able to assist them in training of their own staff in what to look for when dealing with foreign companies. Additionally we were able to collect substantial sums of monies for them through our foreign section and then by our extensive portfolio of agents throughout the world.

We had been acting for a nationwide company for a number of years doing ad-hoc training on various credit management and legal topics. Following a change of management we were ask to carry out regular on going training for existing staff and also were incorporated into their induction program for new starters in their collection departments.

We were requested to attend offices all over the country including Belfast to carry out training. For new starters we wrote a particular training program to cover the basic principles of credit management, telephone collection techniques, identifying legal entities and the legal process. This proved to be a very important part of their induction as the vast majority of new recruits had no previous knowledge of collections.

With the existing staff more in-house training programmes were written on topics such as legal entities, erosion of profit margins, legal process and insolvency. These have proved to be very successful and have been expanded to other parts of the business including sales personnel and we have been invited on a number of occasions to speak at national conferences on these subjects.

Over the years when we have been carrying out this training the staff who have left and gone to other business have then requested we carry out similar training programs for the staff at their new employers.

Acting for a television advertising company collecting outstanding debts whilst they were winding down the business which resulted in collections of 87% of the ledger passed across.

We were approached by the temporary credit manager of the business who we had previously carried out work for to assist him in pre and post legal collections for them. It was clear from the beginning that the debts were in some instances a couple of years old and had not been chased for a long time if at all. Also in addition to company’s in England & Wales there were debts in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Eire.

The debts ranged from a few hundred pounds to in excess of £35,000. After sending out the initial letters we made telephone calls to all of the debtors who had no intention of paying as they knew that the client was winding down the business and believed they could get away without paying. They made every excuse not to pay including spurious disputes which we were able to counter and continual requests for paperwork which we had in our possession.

Due to perseverance on the telephone we only had to issue proceedings on 6% of the matters and recovered in each instance.