Your collection figures are generally only as good as the team you have appointed to manage the process and if you want to improve performance in this area, you first must put in place processes that allow you to track and measure progress along the way. This will typically involve a lot of number crunching and sifting through data, but with the right reporting tools in place you should be able to ask almost any question and get instant real time results.
With this in mind, we have outlined below five key questions we believe you should be asking your revenues team, so that you can get a handle on how they are performing not only at that moment in time but over any timescales you wish to assess.
1. Can you provide me with a list of our biggest debtors, money owed and current enforcement stage?
Any team worth their salt should be able to quite quickly and easily run a report providing a full list of debtors, which can be sorted by value of debt, type of debt and how long the debt has been owed and where enforcement is up to. If they’re really slick they should be able to run a side-by-side comparison of how this tallies up against the previous year’s figure. Giving you a true picture of whether performance is better or worse.
2. Which of our debtors are most likely to pay?
If they can answer this they are well and truly on their ‘A’ game, as this goes beyond the usual requirements of the role. It shows they have taken the initiative to set up some kind of payment history review that helps them identify a debtor’s propensity to pay. Either that or they have used the input of credit referencing agencies. Be careful on this one though, if they have gone down this path they should then be willing to show that the results this approach has yielded has far outweighed the costs.
3. What are your predictions on how much debt will have to be written-off this year?
Predictions can be a dangerous thing, particularly when they affect corporate budgeting. However if your team can demonstrate they have been made based on some order propecia solid analysis of historical data and enforcement stage reached, then this makes the insight all the more useful and potentially realistic. If your team are doing this as a matter of course, it signifies they are taking a proactive approach to debt management and understand the value in being able to provide these details to help balance council budgets more effectively.
4. How much revenue do we currently have on hold?
Being able to put a solid figure on this indicates that your team are not content to let cases fall through the gaps. It means that they have gone to the trouble to ensure they have a way of measuring what is on hold and ideally why it’s on hold, who put it on hold, the value of it and how long it has been on hold. Taking it a step further if they can view the length of time that a case has been on hold they have the potential to minimise debt write-offs which occur because they have become statute-barred. This is a sure-fire way of knowing you have a team dedicated to smashing targets on collection rates.
5. How productive are you and the team as a whole?
You can tell you have a team dedicated to improving performance if they can offer total transparency down to an individual level indicating how each person is performing. A good way of measuring how much work has been done is by being able to track the number of work items completed by each team member or by how many transactions have been created or posted per individual. If you request this information on a regular basis you can start seeing patterns amongst how individuals are performing over time and against other team members and cultivate a more performance orientated and motivational environment.
Proper analysis of your data is the key to being able to assess the performance of your Revenues team and with investment in the right reporting tools and a little bit of initiative they should be able to answer the questions above.
Contact us on 01772 842092 or email info@destin.co.uk for more details on how we can help you better measure team performance.
