Basic Facts About Debt Collection Important To Your Business
No matter what your business is or what its size is, at some point or another debt collection will become an issue for you. Following are the basics of debt collection so you can find out what you need to know in order to decide whether to handle it yourself or if you need a collection agency to help you.
The first thing you need to know is that some collection agencies will actually buy debt from you. This means they pay you an agreed-upon percentage of what’s owed you, and then they own the rights to whatever money they get back from the debtor. If you need some of your money back right away this may be the way to go regarding debt collection. Another option is to let them take a percentage of the money after they collect it. Either way, you don’t have to outlay money up front so it’s favorable to you to hire a collection agency.
The first step an agency will take is to send a letter on your behalf informing the debtor of the money owed and giving them 30 days to dispute the facts regarding the case. Most debtors do not respond to these letters, at which point the collection agency starts calling them.
The next thing you need to do in debt collection is reporting unpaid bills to the credit bureaus. This often causes consumers to pay on past due accounts because they want to keep a decent credit score.
The next step a collection agency might take is to hire a private investigator or use private investigation software in order to locate the debtor if they’re having trouble getting him or her on the phone. If you’re not using an agency, you can do this yourself with websites like Net Detective or Intellius.
As long as you have a previous address for the person and they have a phone number associated with one of the previous addresses, the software can find them. This is important because it cuts down on the debtor’s ability to avoid collections calls, and also because when they realize they can’t hide from you it’s often scary enough to make them want to pay.
The reasons to do this are many. First, if you can’t get the debtor on the phone, it’s impossible to work out payment arrangements with him or her. The other thing is that some debtors, when they learn they can’t hide from you, become much more amenable to working things out in order to stop the collections calls and letters.
There’s a lot to be said for getting a partial settlement right away, because the more time goes on the less likely it is that you will recover the debt. However, if you work out a payment plan you’ll also make more money on interest over time, so this is a perfectly legitimate resolution to debt collection problems as well. Either way, using debt collection techniques that debt collectors use will help you get more of your money back.
Tags: Credit Bureaus, Debtor, Credit Score, Private Investigator
