Permalink9 November 2009 at 12:18 by Alan Capel - Head of Content
Posted under Boring but necessary announcements
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We often get calls and emails from contributors asking us to chase up payments on sales that are in their accounts but still uncleared.
We are currently investing a lot of time and effort in seeing where the sale is in our chase cycle and then responding to these queries to explain that we are still chasing.
This doesn’t really seem to be a particularly beneficial exercise, yes it might reassure you as a contributor that we are ‘on the case’ but it doesn’t speed up the process as we take all outstanding debt equally seriously.
It may help to explain our process and current performance. We have varying credit terms for different customers and this flexibility makes sense for us.
The average length of time a customer takes to pay their account with us is currently 49 days. We consider this to be pretty good in today’s climate. We are also happy to share our bad debt statistics with you. Bad debt for the last full year (2008) was below 0.05%, or to put it another way, if you make a sale today you've got a 99.95% chance of getting the money from it.
We vigorously pursue late payments, 99% of our debt is recovered within 90 days of it going overdue. In very rare circumstances, we may have to pursue a legal course of action and this can take a long term, sometimes years even.
If a sale remains uncleared on your balance of account (marked with an x) this means we are still pursuing the money using all the tools at our disposal.
It’s important that we dedicate our time to activities that will bear fruit for us all so please try to avoid sending emails that can only be met with the honest response that we are still chasing the payment.
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