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Do you know how to collect from your customers? Good Question.   I know because I follow the 4 Ps of Collections: Be Prepared, Be Professional, Be Punctual, Be Persistent.   Be Prepared.  Your customer account information will include contact information for accounts payable.  Call up the customer account on the screen in front of you, check […]

You can’t be in two places at the same time.   It is a fact, a law of physics.   And it is one of the things that they don’t teach you about in Credit Managers’ School. People at work try to defy that law.  You see it all the time.  Someone is at a conference and

Do you have the right stuff to be a Credit or Collections manager?  To be fair, not everyone does.  Most people in this line of work fall into it, rather than plan for it.  Then they stay because they enjoy it and are good at it.  As their career develops, they take courses, perhaps leading

Are your company’s sales incentive programs “out to lunch”?   Incentives matter.  For the sales team, they usually come in the form of bonuses and commissions.  And those incentives tell employees, particularly sales teams, what a company wants them to do.  What do your company’s incentives tell your employees to do? If the incentive is open-ended,

Leaving Credit Decisions to Non-Credit Staff Who should make Credit decisions?   The answer seems obvious: the Credit Team should make Credit decisions.   But should they make all Credit decisions?  Or are some decisions so important that they should be made by someone more senior than the Credit Manager?  During my career, there have been times

Part 4 – Missing the Warning Signs of Insolvency If you have played Trivial Pursuit, you may have come across a question in the original game pack, and I am paraphrasing, “What has been the single cause of death for every human who has ever lived?”  The answer is: lack of oxygen to the brain. 

Part 3 – Waiting too long to collect I cannot tell you how many times a fellow employee has come up to me and said “You have the worst job in the company.  I could never do what you do”.   Why did they say that?  Because, for about thirty-two years, my job has involved calling

Part 2 – Not Knowing Your Customer How do you know who you can trust and who you can believe? To figure that out, a Credit Manager needs to know their customer.  Ultimately, what you want to know is whether the customer will pay you as they have agreed.  And as I wrote in Part

My name is Jay McKeown and I have been a designated member (CCP) of the Credit Institute of Canada since 1992.  I am the Past President and Dean of the CIC, and I have been working in Credit and Collections since 1988. I believe that Credit and Collections people: lead, evaluate, research, analyze, monitor, decide,