Instant Offices

The challenge

With the rapid expansion of the business, Instant Offices was looking to invest in technology to help it to automate and streamline business processes. As well as looking to upgrade to a more flexible and complex ERP system, Instant Offices wanted a solution that would help it to streamline its credit control procedures to cope with the growing demands of the business. As many ERP systems offer only a basic level of collections functionality, Instant Offices found that Credit Hound was the ideal solution to automate many of its credit control processes. On seeing the initial demonstration of Credit Hound, Mel Warren, Credit Control & Treasury Manager at Instant Offices was impressed by the level of functionality offered: “We were completely blown away by Credit Hound; there was so much it could do and we thought it would be a great tool for our growing company. When we upgraded our ERP system, it was crucial that it could integrate with Credit Hound.”

The solution

With the need for its new ERP system to integrate with Credit Hound, Instant Offices made the decision to upgrade to Microsoft Dynamics GP. Credit Hound merges accounting information from GP to display which invoices are due for payment, overdue or in dispute. This saves a huge amount of time for the credit controllers and enables them to quickly focus on their daily tasks and manage their workloads.

In addition, Credit Hound helps Instant The results Offices to significantly save on postage and stationery costs and reduce administration time by automatically sending out pre-emptive and late payment reminders to clients. Mel Warren explained the benefits to the business: “The ability to send 300 emails at the click of a button is a huge time saver for our business. It would take a credit controller so much longer to make even 30 telephone calls.” Credit Hound sends out different levels of automated reminders to late payers, ranging from a ‘soft’ chase to a ‘hard’ chase approach and sends pre-emptive reminders when invoices are almost due to increase the likelihood of getting paid on time. When a credit controller is dealing with a late payment call, they can also use Credit Hound to log call details, send follow-up emails, add call reminders to their calendar and manage
disputes. Credit Hound also enables the credit control manager to monitor his team’s performance, measure how time is spent and report key information back to management. As the company tries to operate as ‘paperlessly’ as possible, Instant Offices also uses Spindle Document Distribution with Microsoft Dynamics GP to email over 1000 invoices a month and attach relevant invoices to outgoing reminder emails from Credit Hound. Credit Hound allowed the team of 5 credit controllers to continue a high level of credit control service throughout its period of expansion, whilst chasing late payment more efficiently to reduce outstanding payments.

The results

Reduced number of calls needed to chase payments.

Improved cash flow by reducing number of debtor days from 55 days to 38 days.

Improved department efficiency and provided greater focus.

Delivered better customer service by treating clients in a more consistent manner.

Improved tracking of disputed invoices.