Making I.T. Happen
Accounting and Information Technology, Assistance and Support
Sage 50 - Credit Management and Credit control

There are several features in Sage 50 to help you with credit management and control.

1/ Statements

2/ Payment chasing letters

3/ Telephone collection

Statements are the first line of attack, they are easy to do and are effective in most cases.  If you have a large number of statements to send out, then you may be interested in sending statements (and payment chasing letters) by email

To produce statements simply select the customers for whom you wish to produce statements (or select none for all customers) and use the statements icon to produce a print run.

Payment Chasing Letters

To produce chasing letters, you need to select groups of customers for each letter, the groups are based on the aged balances of the accounts, so a gentle reminder may go to customers who have debts between 30 and 59 days but nothing older, a firm reminder may go to those between 60 and 89 days but nothing older, a final demand may got to those between 90 and 119 days and the rest ie 120 days + will have to be dealt with manually, probably with legal action.

To select these groups you need to use the search option (criteria in older versions).  The search option is very powerful and well worth getting to know.  Once you have built each search you can save it for use next time.  To save you time and hassle you can download a zipfile containing the three searches for each letter. You need to unpack it to your criteria subdirectory in your line50 installation path.

There are three letters supplied with Sage 50 called itemised chase letters, there was a problem with the installation of these on some network versions, if you do not have the files, you can get them by doing a single user installation to your server and then reinstalling a server installation.

The letter will need to be altered in the Report designer, simply click edit instead of run in letters module with the letter you want to alter selected.

You don't need to know much about the report designer to alter the text, just click into the boxes with the text already there and overtype it with something in your own style.

Choose the save as option so that if you mess it up you will still have the original.

To do the run each month, simply load the search rules for letter one and then print letter one, repeat for letter two and three and your credit management letters are all done.

Letters with statements enclosed are not as effective as letters on their own.

Telephone Collection.

The telephone is the most effective way of collecting debts, to make life easier you can get a head set phone so that your hands are free to write or lookup on the computer as you talk.  You can get inexpensive devices in Argos.

To make life even easier fit a modem to your pc and plug your headset into the same line (you make need a telephone socket doubler to do this)

Select the group of customer that you are going to chase, you can pick them manually, use the searches we created for letters and you can sort the list by balance by clivking on the balance header on the customer screen.

Having selected the customers, go to the record screen and move to the contact tab. And select new.  On the pop up screen click the phone to auto dial the company, note the name of your main contact is on the screen, you are identified by your login name. You can even start the timer and produce a bill for your time (perhaps this feature would be better suited to a support environment)

In the main box you can make note on your conversations, you can set a follow up date in the box provided after the call.

All notes are now neatly recorded on the screen, other people talking to the customer can see the notes and can be aware of any issues.

To deal with follow ups, launch the Task Manager and go to contacts, here you will find listed all contacts in each category.