How Accounts Receivable Turnover can be influenced by an offshore team?

Controlling the turnover on accounts receivable is a critical function in any business. After all, running a successful business is not just about making sales. It is about making profits. And to make profits, your invoices need to be paid! Managing Accounts Receivables is a detail-ridden process and most business owners would rather focus their energies on marketing their products and services to drive business growth, rather than get bogged down with this 'necessary evil'. It therefore makes it both a strategic as well as a cost-effective option to consider outsourcing this important function of your business. Thanks to technology and the Internet, an offshore team can manage your Accounts Receivables just as effectively as your own staff sitting in your office. Or, can they? Let us examine some important considerations for a successful offshore model for Accounts receivables management.

Call strategy

Knowing which customers to call is perhaps the most important decision to be made before your offshore agent picks the phone to your customers. Most finance and accounting packages will help you generate a customer aging report that helps to see the age of the receivables from your various customers. Most certainly, your friendly offshore agent can be put on the job for calling customers with the worst aging profile without a second thought. Sure, some customers will not be very happy with this diligent follow up. Never mind. Remember that although the word customer is highly esteemed, it is not quite complete in itself. The more correct usage must be 'paying customer' !

Knowing the customer account

The previous statement on the customer would probably not go down well with most salesmen and that\'s quite understandable. It is no doubt prudent to respect sensitivities on every customer account when following up for payments. It would be a good idea for the offshore agent, who is your dedicated person following up on collecting your money, to interact periodically with your sales team. This helps cross functional team-work and helps everyone to realize that the real joy is when money is received for products or services given, rather than at the time of making the sale. In other words, the Accounts Receivable agent and the Sales team work together with the common interest of the company.

What are the measures to track?

It is important to keep an eye on some of the key measures and track them in order to ensure that Accounts receivables turnover is being managed well. Some of the key measures widely used are: Days in receivable: The time taken for a receivable to turn into cash is expressed by a "days-in-receivable" number. Days in receivable is equal to your annual net sales by 365, the number of days in a year. The resulting number is then divided into the current accounts receivable figure from the Balance Sheet. The answer will give you the number of days that an average credit sale will remain in accounts receivable before it converts into cash. Accounts receivables Turnover: This is the average duration of an account receivable, equal to total credit sales divided by the accounts receivable. Your Accounts receivable agent can keep a track of these and other measures that you may find useful and send you periodic reports to help you make important business decisions.

Feedback and recommendations for policy changes

The feedback from your offshore accounts receivable agent is very valuable as it reveals which customers are faithful with the payments and which ones are not. This information can have a significant influence on how you decide pricing and credit policies . Outsourcing your accounts receivable management to an offshore team is a proven model with both cost benefits as well as productivity gains through faster turnaround times. It would also help you and your staff to focus on core areas. *The author leads a team in Bangalore, India that has brought significant advantages to a leading seafood company in the United States by managing their accounts receivables turnover.