The challenge
As the business quickly grew in size and Swanstaff Recruitment expanded out to 23 branches, the credit control team based at the head office in Dartford were still working the way they always had – splitting up spreadsheets between the team to manually monitor and chase late payments. This process was becoming increasingly tedious and it was equally frustrating to be unable to add comments to their accounting system, Sage 50 Accounts. Also, they found the standard payment terms of 30 days in Sage did not suit the business. Like many recruitment agencies, Swanstaff has a 14 day payment term policy.
The solution
In 2015, a new member of the credit control team who had used Credit Hound at a previous company recommended it to Swanstaff to help improve credit management processes. Credit Hound was installed by Draycir and the Swanstaff team quickly benefited from its advanced credit control functionality. With many of their administration processes now automated, the team could now put all their efforts into chasing accounts, Head of Sales Ledger, Victoria Nanson said: “Before Credit Hound it would take us 2 weeks to chase overdue accounts, now it only takes a week.”
Now real-time data is synced from their Sage 50 Accounts systems into Credit Hound and it is the only system the credit control team needs to use to perform their jobs. By setting bespoke credit terms to individual accounts, reminders and chasing letters are automatically sent out based on the actual due date. This has encouraged more clients to pay quicker and helped to increase their cash flow by 20%. Victoria Nanson said the team has found the credit control system very easy to use. “We love Credit Hound! It’s very user friendly and helps us to quickly respond to customer queries. We can view invoices, add notes to the account and see when payments are due.” They can add notes to transactions that they previously couldn’t do, schedule chasing activities via the calendar and monitor their activities more closely than ever before.
Credit Hound has given Swanstaff Recruitment exactly what they needed to meet their credit control requirements and has supported the growth of the team as the business has expanded.
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