Idea: 96
Monday, 06 April 2015
By Alex Foster
The Hound
B2B invoicing is a nightmare. The entire industry uses late payments as a means of increasing working capital, even massive companies like Unilever. It’s systematically stupid as it slow the entire industry down, decreases the nimbleness of innovation and creates bad blood.
We have set up invoice factoring which is amazing — we get paid 45 days early, as soon as we invoice, for the princely sum of 3% of the total. Very smart arbitrage idea. But we still have to employ someone to chase them down and he’s not an expert and he’s doing it all based on his own task management system.
It would make sense to master the art of invoice chasing and make it a service. You sign up to us and we will set up factoring for you with one of our partners, all the hassle on our end, then hound that company’s invoice team until they pay you, promptly and in full.
We have an automatic system of escalation — if they aren’t confirming 100% payment due dates then we start calling them (we have all the numbers saved and relationships with all the guys in every invoicing department) on your behalf as a representative of your company.
From automatic friendly emails that look like they’re from real people to auto calls, scripts and light, professional threats of legal action… we get it done. For my business this would mean $30k a year less in employment fees, a couple hours of my time a week returned, less headache and much steadier income.
That’s quite valuable as a service!