61pc of businesses struggle to collect debts
61 per cent of businesses are struggling to collect debts due to a range of issues including holding incorrect email addresses.
According to new research by Debt Register, the poor credit performance of many businesses is also related to the absence of competent staff to manage data.
Businesses of all sizes have been left unable to collect debts because the key contact details they had for each customer before the pandemic have not been updated.
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Furthermore, many of these firms have no systems in place to check their data, while others are unable to spare staff the necessary time to manage the workload.
“It could mean that they are not aware they have a problem, which is arguably more concerning,” said Gary Brown, founder of Debt Register.
“But whether they are aware that they have of problem or not, fixing the issue is causing a major headache.
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“Corporate machines are such that deploying internal resources to achieve a manual fix is unviable: it takes people away from the frontline and chasing current debt. But this is a false economy: the biggest single cause for the non-collection of debt is poor data, and specifically, the wrong email contact, so finding a fix is essential.”
Brown added that without fixing this fundamental flaw, debts that might otherwise be easily collected are again either going to written off or passed to a third-party, directly impacting a company’s bottom line.
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