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Collections Best Practices
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will present on a single screen all of the contact information related to each
customer, including the promises made by customers, open issues, and contact
information. The system will also allow the user to enter information for a fax,
and then route it directly to the recipient, without requiring the collections person
to ever leave his or her chair. It can also be linked to an auto-dialer, so that the
collections staff spends less time attempting to establish connections with over-
due customers. To further increase the efficiency of the collections staff, it will
even determine the time zone in which each customer is located and prioritize the
recommended list of calls, so that only those customers in time zones that are
currently in the midst of standard business hours will be called.
The GetPAID system does not just store collections data—it can also export
it to other systems, where it can be altered for other uses or reformatted for man-
agement reporting purposes (though the package contains its own reporting fea-
tures, as well). Some of the standard reports include a time-series report on per-
formance of individual collection personnel, as well as the same information for
each customer. It can also create reports that are tailored by recipient—for exam-
ple, all of the collection problems for a specific salesperson’s customers can be
lumped into one report and sent to that salesperson for remedial action. The soft-
ware can also export data files into Excel or Access.
There are several cost issues to consider when installing this type of soft-
ware—not only of the software itself, but also for staff training time, installation
by consultants, and ongoing maintenance costs. Offsetting these problems is a
much shorter time period before a company will have an advanced collections
software system fully operational. The record time period for a GetPAID installa-
tion is just five days, though a more typical installation speed is 60 days. For
those companies with a serious collections problem and that need help right
away, a comprehensive collections software package may be the answer.

Cost: Installation time:

7–17 INSTITUTE LOCKBOX COLLECTIONS

Customers sometimes have difficulty in sending their payments to the correct
address; they send them to the attention of someone they know at a company, such
as a salesperson, or they send it to the wrong company location. Sometimes, even if
they send a payment to the correct company location, the mailroom personnel mis-
takenly direct the payment to the wrong department, where it languishes for a few
days until it is rerouted to the correct person. Finally, even if the payment goes to
the correct person in the correct department, that person may not be available for a
few days, perhaps due to sickness or vacation. In all of these instances, there is a
delay in cashing checks and, more importantly from a collections standpoint, there
is a delay in applying checks to open accounts receivable. When this delay occurs,