Het Team Juridische Zaken – Monika Boomgaard
“When I joined the Legal Affairs Team, I also inherited Debitan. The company had been using the system for a while. After two months of training and familiarization, I proactively contacted them myself. Nathalie is our dedicated contact person, and I have a great feeling about her. We have weekly meetings where we catch up on practical matters. Short but effective. Nathalie knows our customers and understands what’s happening in our company and with our customers. This allows us to have efficient discussions and quickly move forward. It gives me the reassurance that everything is well taken care of. I know that everything is running smoothly.
Effective debt management is crucial
Debt management needs to be systematic. If you say you’re going to follow up with customers and then fail to do so, you lose momentum with the customer. Procrastination becomes easy for both parties. Debt management is a sensitive part of your business process. If it doesn’t run smoothly, it impacts the entire company. After all, less money is coming in. Especially in these times, it can be detrimental to your business. In small companies, you often see someone in the accounting department with multiple responsibilities, including debt management. This is very vulnerable and prone to errors. It’s easy to forget to make those follow-up calls to customers regarding outstanding invoices. That’s why we decided to outsource debt management. We believe in letting specialists do what they’re good at. We do the same ourselves. You can’t do everything yourself, and you don’t have to. This way, we save a lot of time, energy, errors, and money.
Sow first, then reap
Last year, there were various internal changes within our company. We have a large customer base and different business models coexisting. Internally, we have digitized many processes to stay up to date with market developments. It’s important that all those systems communicate with each other. Together with Nathalie, I worked hard on the workflows, the administration itself, and how everything worked together. Now, we are reaping the benefits of all that work from the past year. Maybe we won’t need to make weekly calls anymore because everything is going smoothly, but I appreciate that they took the time to get to know each other well.
The success mix for your debt management
In my opinion, you can attribute successful outsourcing of your debt management, like what we’re doing now, to the following mix:
- A solid process with experienced employees who know what they’re doing.
- Good communication with the customer, in this case, us, so that you truly understand each other.
- Organization on the customer’s side. We are responsible for providing customer and invoice data promptly. Otherwise, you can’t expect everything to run smoothly.
- A good collaboration between the debt management team and the customer.
Our debt management now runs mostly automatically through different workflows for the different entities. The workflows have been fine-tuned specifically for us. It feels like a customized system. Every step is calculated with mathematical precision. While the system is working, we can focus on our profession. We can run our business worry-free and do what we excel at. That’s what I wish for every entrepreneur.”