Case Studies

After visiting one of our members today, I realised what a difference we make to members when they make full use of our services. This has been one of my accounts since 2005 and use us as an integral part of running their business.

They told me that they wouldn’t dream of opening an account without taking a Status report, and they now never gave credit above the limits suggested. By monitoring they also get a ‘heads up’ on any changes and feel that they know circumstances as they happen.

When our Monitoring service flagged-up that a director had resigned from a relatively new customer, they called him to understand the changes within that company, and were much more cautious about extending credit to them – this proved to be a good move as the company sank into insolvency!

They are not concerned that our polite letters prompting payment directly to our Member (not to CPA) will ‘upset their customers’ as in their experience they continue to trade happily and they get paid quicker too.

Our credit application form is so much part of their process that they thought it was their own. When I reminded them that it based on the CPA document they said that they had forgotten as they had been using it for so long!

Oh happy days visiting such a lovely customer.

The bulk of their turnover is in machinery costing six figure sums and payment for this capital equipment is in advance, usually by way of a finance company or bank. CPA chase their service and maintenance accounts when they are 4 to 7 months overdue! Even at this relatively late age of account, over the last 5 years we have achieved an 89.29% resolve rate on their behalf, helped by the fact that they now only ever deal with credit worthy customers.

Our Field Service Manager, Julie Bloom, told us today about a new member who only just joined us a couple of months ago. This long established electrical contractor from Buckinghamshire had approached the Credit Protection Association for help a few months ago and she had just been to visit them to see how they were doing.

The member approached us after one of his creditors had asked us to chase him for money. We motivated him to pay his creditor and upon consideration our new member had thought it might work for him and his debtors. He had a number of accounts that were very overdue and while it wasn’t a lot of money and wasn’t yet having a major impact on his cash flow, it was irking him that they were ‘getting away with it’.

Up until then they had been collecting their own debts but found that some would just ignore them, even when they were called.

Once we got involved and were able to investigate, it turned out that he was billing the wrong name. The correctly named business had a decent enough credit rating and no county court judgements showing so once we got the paperwork in order, we started chasing. The debtors initially resisted but we recommended legal action and our member decided to ‘give it a go’.

They have just received judgement and advice of payment from our solicitors with all the costs recovered including late payment compensation and interest. Our member is thrilled with our success!

In fact his accounts manager did a costing summary of our subscription, and taking into account the cost of the subscription and the debts recovered to date (his other three debtors all paid in full as a result of our Overdue Account Recovery System and legal action wasn’t necessary) and they are already up by £9500 after only a few months! As she said to him, ”a complete result”!

They now monitoring all their customers with us so they get the email alerts of any changes, but more importantly, they are checking they have the correct trading names and making sure they are credit worthy before doing anything.

Our client is a very happy member and looking for opportunities to recommend us to others!