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7–11 Set Up Automatic Fax of Overdue Invoices
tial loss of existing accounts receivable. The only case where a company would
not want to have advance notification set up is for customers that rarely make
orders and usually of a small size when they do; in this case, a small credit limit
is adequate protection against any major bad debt losses.
Cost: Installation time:

7–11 SET UP AUTOMATIC FAX OF OVERDUE INVOICES
The most common request that a collections person receives from a customer is
to send a copy of an invoice that the customer cannot find. To do so, the collec-
tions person must either access the accounting computer system to print out a
copy of the invoice or go to the customer’s file to find it. Then the collections per-
son must create a cover letter and fax the cover letter and invoice to the customer.
In addition, the fax may not go through, in which case the collections person
must repeat this process after learning from the customer that the fax never
arrived. This process is typically the longest of all collections tasks—a collection
call may only take a few minutes, but faxing an invoice can take several times
that amount.
Few companies have found a way around the faxing problem. Those that
have done so use the most advanced of all best practices in the collections area—
automatically extracting an invoice record from the accounting database and fax-
ing it to the customer—all at the touch of a button. To do so, a company must link
the invoice file in the accounting database to another file that contains the name
and fax number of the recipient, combine these two files to create a cover letter
and invoice, and route the two records to a fax server for automatic transmission,
one that will keep transmitting until the fax goes through, and then notify the
sender of successful or failed transmissions. The advantages of this approach are
obvious: immediate turnaround time, no need for the collections person to move
to complete a fax, and automatic notification if there is a problem in completing a
fax. For a company with a large collections staff, this represents a monumental
improvement in efficiency.
The trouble with setting up an automatic invoice-faxing system is that one
must put together several functions that are not normally combined. This almost
certainly calls for customized programming and may have a risk that the system
will periodically fail, due to the complex interlinking of different systems. To
give a picture of the complexity of this system, the front end of the system must
include an input screen for the collections person that allows entry of the cus-
tomer’s contact name and fax number, as well as any accompanying text that
should go on the cover letter to accompany the faxed invoice. On the same
screen, one should be able to enter an invoice number so that the software auto-
matically searches the invoice file and selects the correct invoice. There may be
an additional step at this point, where the system presents a text image of the