Company Payment Records and Payment History For Credit Control

Having comprehensive knowledge of your ledger is the only way you can really understand your clients and their payment behaviours. Credit agencies can offer you access to credit analysis and credit rating schemes which can uncover vital trends within your business, although these can sometimes be lengthy and missing vital data not to mention difficult to understand.

This is why companies such as Experian offer payment performance schemes which work through commercial data sharing. These schemes look closely at transactional data in order to give you an in-depth insight into companies payments trends which have been calculated using a wide range of factors, so you can have all the information you could possibly need to recognise risk and act accordingly.

In other words, it's known as a ledger sharing scheme, and it can help you manage credit within your business. It works by:

• Providing you with a comprehensive analysis of a potential customers payment habits
• Helping you protect your business by allowing you to either decline slow payers or put in place appropriate credit terms with, for example, agreed interest to be paid on arrears
• Allowing you to take action based on how your customers are behaving with other suppliers? are they paying up?

 

Knowledge in numbers

The fact is payment records gives access to payment information covering over £145 billion and 22 million ledger transactions processed ever month. It's access to the most up-to-date information and UK business payment trends which helps you see the bigger picture, and other companies, too.
 

More up to date

 
The other advantage of payment records is that they reflect payment performance up to the most recent months transactions. This can bridge the often significant gap between the date of the last filed accounts which can be a year or more old.
 

Customer management

In business, especially if you are managing credit over a large customer database, it's important to know your customer's payment trends and behaviour. Changes in your customers' payment performances can be seen as the earlier possible sign that they could be having financial trouble. It's also one of the most predictive elements that they may fail to make a payment ahead of any official documentation or public notices.
 

What does a credit analysis report look like? 

Glad you asked. Here is a sample of one of our own credit analysis reports. As you can see, it's quite detailed and provides you with a comprehensive overview of a company's recent payment performance in the form of lists, charts and graphs.

Towards the bottom you'll notice the company have provided their own advice, which in this example reads: "First Report Credit Opinion: For the reasons explained in our analysis we would not advise credit." This is predicted using the information detailed in the report, as well as the company's Altman Z-Score and the credit risk assessment score.

For more information on credit analysis reports and getting the most out of them for your business, contact us today. 

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