Thursday, July 23, 2009

Outsource Billing Services Can Save Your Business Lots Of Money

By David P. Montana

Few companies think about the advantages of hiring an outsource billing service, but these benefits are many for a variety of businesses. Following is a discussion of the good reasons to obtain an outsource billing service and the way to choose the right one for your company.

Outsource billing services work for both private businesses and governments, and they often are a branch of third party collection agencies. If you want to hire an outsource billing service your first criteria should be whether or not they also do collections. This will ensure that if your accounts go into collections, the process will be seamless and cost-effective.

Rather than you having to search for a new vendor and spend time and money and resources turning over accounts to them, collection agencies that are part of outsource billing services can begin the collections process as soon as the account starts to look troublesome.

That time window can make the difference between getting a good percentage of the money owed to you back and getting nothing. Statistics show that after 60 days the chances of getting a return drop steeply the more time goes on. If your billing service can handle collections without an exchange of files, it's much more efficient and much more likely that you'll get your money back.

Using a service like this can also help by cutting your operating costs. Many of them handle a great number of files and as a result get volume discounts from their own vendors, like phone companies, and bulk rates on mailings. Having these savings partially credited to you can make a huge difference in your monthly operational costs.

There is no reason to pay more and to waste the resources of your accounting department or your sales department on billing or collections of any kind. Hire professionals, pay less for operational costs and free up your own staff to work on more productive, business-generating tasks. When you're looking for an outsource billing service, ask them how many accounts they service in your industry. In this case, the more the better because of the cost savings.

Of course, if you hire an outsource billing service you will have to pay them a monthly fee, while many if not most collections agencies only charge a percentage of any money they recover. This is a serious benefit to the cash flow of any business or governmental department, so when you're interviewing potential outsource billing services, ask if they are willing to take a monthly fee for the billing services, but a percentage of the take for collections services.

The final thing to remember when choosing an outsource billing service is that you don't want to just turn over your billing to an outside party and then completely forget about it. Although it's better to have a third party perform these functions, you also want to keep an eye on things to make sure that they're being done properly and going smoothly. For this reason, an outsource billing service that provides you with online access to all billing concerns is preferable to one that provides you with written reports. - 2364

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