4 Good Reasons to Get a Refinance Home Loan Try Auto Refinance Bad Credit Refinance Loans - Finding a Good Lender Benefits of Personal Finance Software Bridging Finance Basics Can you afford Not to look After your Personal Finances? Car Finance Places You On The Top Gear While Buying a Car Cash Out Refinance – Home Equity Mortgage Loan or Cash Out Refinance Commercial Collections: Business Finance Booster Shot Doing A California Refinance Online Finance Your Real Estate Investment Properties Finance Your Small Business Foster Home Uses Pay Option Mortgage Loan For California Refinance		Commercial Collections: Business Finance Booster Shot     If commercial collections is not part of your B2B business plan, you're losing money. Get your cash flowing again with these commercial collections secrets. Commercial collections: fixture of the new B2B culture If you're in the business-to-business field, or even if you're a consumer products business that works through third-party distribution channels, you probably know what it's like to check your mail anxiously each day, sifting through all the bills for that payment that was supposed to have been in months ago.
		It wasn't supposed to be like this. If you were a good, honest businessperson who dealt with other good, honest businesspeople, "commercial collections" wasn't supposed to be part of your vocabulary. Back in the good old days, an invoice or purchase order that had an established company listed in the "bill to" field was almost as good as a cashier's check. Nowadays, if you're in the business of serving other businesses you may find that your cash flow is less reliable than a small-time bookie's. Avoiding Outstanding Invoices Of course, you can nip this problem in the bud by cultivating strong relationships with clients who pay on time. But those clients are getting few and far between-and, as I found, the good can go pretty bad pretty fast. Worse, it seems that the larger the business, the less likely they are to pay on time. "Net 10 days" might as well be a foreign language in Fortune 500 land. The long-standing advice given to B2B businesses and self-employed people is that the money is in big corporations. But good luck getting it from them before your rent is due.
		What I Should Have Done Looking back on my experience with the deadbeat corporate client, my biggest mistake was doing it all myself, with writing the letters and making the phone calls. With an hourly rate of about $75, I ended up spending the time equivalent of a large chunk of my $2000 fee. I should have gone to a collection agency. I just didn't know then that were collection agencies that would take on small business debts and run the whole process for you for as little as $20 per debt. Of course, I also didn't know that going to a collection agency didn't necessarily mean "putting an account in collections." Many collection agencies are in fact refashioning themselves as "accounts receivable management" specialists; they'll even manage your invoicing from end-to-end if you want. The client may not even realizing that the person on the phone is from an outside agency and not your own personal assistant. When I think of all the value of the time I spent collecting that last $2,000, I could kick myself for not handing it over to a collection agency. But, I can always look forward to putting this knowledge into practice the next time I have a client who's slow in paying. About The Author Steve Austin is a regular contributor to Let No Debt Remain Outstanding (http://www.let-no-debt-remain-outstanding.com/), a website with articles on choosing a collection agency, along with recommended the best collection agencies.