Guest Author Chris McKee, Managing Partner of Venturity Financial Partners, talks about accounts receivable, customer invoice follow-up and how the InvoiceCare virtual A/R team fits in perfectly with Venturity's solutions.
Venturity, at its core, is basically an outsourced accounting firm. The services that we offer are really the things that an accounting department would do everyday: accounts payable, accounts receivable, payroll coordination, closing the books, financial statement preparation. It's everything from the Controller on down. It is important to understand that people put their trust in us.
I was very excited when I first heard about InvoiceCare because our clients often come to us to ask us to handle collections. My advice to my clients and prospective clients is the last person you want doing collections is your accountant. The accountant is all about getting money and not necessarily about preserving the client relationship.
I think one of the things that people forget about the collections process is that the goal should be to maintain the client relationship, not just collect the money from the customer. Most of our clients don’t have an organized way to go about following up their accounts receivable. InvoiceCare really fills that hole between when the sale is made and when a client needs to be sent to a 3rd party collection agency.
I was very excited to hear about InvoiceCare because it’s a great supplement to the work that we do. It solves a real problem for our clients that we can’t solve. They love having the opportunity to outsource invoice follow-up to InvoiceCare. It can make a huge impact in collectability of accounts receivable and it also shortens the time to cash for our clients as well.
Accounts receivable is really incredibly important in terms of managing cash flow for a business. Every business looks at the top line revenue as their measure of whether they made money or not during the month: how high was revenue, how much money was made. What they forget is that sales are not sales until they’re collected. What sets InvoiceCare apart is the opportunity to make sure that revenue is realized in a way that’s respectful to the client.
The other piece that our clients didn’t realize initially is that having a specialist like InvoiceCare adds a level of professionalism to their collection process. That regular follow-up cycle with clients, alerting them, checking with them to make sure they have the invoice, that prevents a souring of the relationship on the back end. It just seems so much more professional. It seems like our clients are much more on top of things when they have InvoiceCare in place.
Chris McKee is Managing Partner at Venturity Financial Partners. Founded in 2001, Venturity Financial Partners helps growing companies operate more efficiently by providing them with reliable, operationally-focused information that tells the financial story of the business.
"Sales are not sales until they're collected" - Chris McKee of Venturity Financial Partners