Dunning letters - often called final notice letters, are sent when a customer has received services or products from a business, but hasn’t settled the invoice – and that invoice is now overdue.
What is a dunning letter?
Dunning letters - often called final notice letters - are sent when a customer has received services or products from a business, but hasn’t settled the invoice – and that invoice is now overdue. They are an essential part of a thorough credit control process. Some companies send out up to three dunning letters, and others only one. If the dunning letter is ignored, the debt is likely to be passed to an external collections agency.
Do dunning letters work?
In short, yes. A good credit control function will have been sending reminders to customers to remind them that their payment is due shortly. (Sending reminders lowers chances of unpaid invoices by 33%. But that still leaves 66% chance that your clients will pay late, or even fail to pay at all). By sending out a firm but polite dunning letter, you are clearly demonstrating to your customer that late payments will be taken seriously and that the accounts will be passed to a third party debt collection agency if payment is not made within a specified number of days. Dunning letters are taken seriously by most parties and this should be enough to encourage immediate payment. (it is worth noting that email dunning letters are less effective than formal, mailed dunning letters. Email dunning letters only have an average click rate of 2.45% whilst letters are more impactful)
How can Controlaccount help me with my dunning letters?
We work with leading brand names and SMEs to support them in their dunning processes. Together with our clients and using our credit management experience, we will prepare a workflow process based on 1, 2 or 3 letters in our client's branding, and work with them to set the appropriate tone and content to the letters. From here, all we need to know is who needs to pay what and when. For many of our clients, this is simply giving us access to their sales ledger (uploaded to our secure, cloud-based client portal) and we do the rest – making sure that mailed letters go out on the agreed date to the correct recipient. All lettering will go through our internal cleanse department to make sure that the addresses are formatted correctly and valid. We will also manage any returned mail in the instance that your customer has moved on. All for less that the price of a first-class stamp.
And we don’t stop there
Our dunning letter service can direct calls and payments to your own account receivables department or alternatively, we can manage incoming calls via our white labelled call centre service and take payments on your behalf, allocating them to the appropriate account. This is particularly helpful if you have a small credit control team who need to focus on other areas or on key accounts. We would be happy to work with you to build a process whereby any invoices that are not settled within an agreed period of time are passed to our Collections department. These overdue invoices will then be recovered by our CAI trained collectors on a no collect, no fee basis.
If you’re interested in talking to us about how we can help, get in contact today and we will be delighted to discuss your requirements. You can contact us here.
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