What surprised me most was that A/R Connection not only enabled us to collect our past due accounts, but it has also helped us to encourage all of our customers to pay on time.

David Beja
President
Beja Customs Brokers

Customer Profile

Business Challenge

As Beja manages all aspects of a customers shipment, multiple expenses are incurred on the customers behalf.  Items such as freight charges, customs duties, insurance and more require up front payment and Beja bills clients for these fees in addition to their own service charges.  Prompt payment by clients is not only essential to make a profit, but late payments on external fee’s actually cause negative cash flow.

When clients pay late, Beja loses money.  Most clients pay quickly, but there is always a certain percentage who take 90 days or more to refund outlays as well as pay our service fee’s.

In-house efforts proved to be sporadic, time consuming, and produced mixed results at best.  Collection agencies had produced minimal returns on our seriously past due customers.  Our business had embraced technology in a number of ways, yet our collections process had not evolved in years.

Solution Overview

Over the last several years, our business constantly updated and improved both efficiencies and technologies to help propel us to become one of the most efficient and productive customs house brokers in the industry.  Our invoicing system worked well... when clients paid as expected.  The challenge came when the few did not make timely payments.

As a relatively small company, we attempted to “share” the burden of calling and otherwise contacting past due clients to encourage or demand payment.  This was most employees least favorite task.  It often produced minimal results and distracted employees from there main tasks, generating income for the company or managing existing client relationships.

Business Benefit

"Within less than two months, we collected a very substantial amount  of our past due invoices using the A/R Connection system.  Many had been outstanding for well over a year and all had received our usual collections methods.  Our ROI was immediate and in fact the monthly cost is far, far less than any other method used to date.

Manually collecting past due bills was time consuming and produced minimal results.  Outsourcing to a collection agency had even worse results.  Remarkably, the easiest system - one that is largely automated and managed in-house proved also to have the best results.

Collections used to require 40 “man-hours” a month.  This takes less than half an hour a month to manage.  We get better results and save quite a bit in payroll to boot."

ROI

• Monthly ROI achieved in first day of the month
• AR Connection brings a quick and constant return.