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Insights and advice from a Certified Credit Professional.
Confessions of a Credit Manager
How should you approach collecting your Accounts Receivable from your customer? I suggest following the 4 Ps: Prepared, Professional, Punctual, Persistent. Be Prepared. Your customer account information will include contact information for…
Read More →Confessions of a Credit Manager 4
Do you know how to collect from your customers? Good Question. I know because I follow the 4 Ps of Collections: Be Prepared, Be Professional, Be Punctual, Be Persistent. Be Prepared. Your customer account information will include contact…
Read More →Confessions of Credit Manager 3
You can’t be in two places at the same time. It is a fact, a law of physics. And it is one of the things that they don’t teach you about in Credit Managers’ School. People at work try to defy that law. You see it all the time. Someone is…
Read More →Confessions of a Credit Manager 2
Do you have the right stuff to be a Credit or Collections manager? To be fair, not everyone does. Most people in this line of work fall into it, rather than plan for it. Then they stay because they enjoy it and are good at it. As their…
Read More →Confessions of a Credit Manager Part 1
Are your company’s sales incentive programs “out to lunch”? Incentives matter. For the sales team, they usually come in the form of bonuses and commissions. And those incentives tell employees, particularly sales teams, what a company…
Read More →5 Biggest Credit Mistakes Part 5
Leaving Credit Decisions to Non-Credit Staff Who should make Credit decisions? The answer seems obvious: the Credit Team should make Credit decisions. But should they make all Credit decisions? Or are some decisions so important that they…
Read More →5 Biggest Credit Mistakes Part 4
Part 4 – Missing the Warning Signs of Insolvency If you have played Trivial Pursuit, you may have come across a question in the original game pack, and I am paraphrasing, “What has been the single cause of death for every human who has…
Read More →5 Biggest Credit Mistakes Part 3
Part 3 – Waiting too long to collect I cannot tell you how many times a fellow employee has come up to me and said “You have the worst job in the company. I could never do what you do”. Why did they say that? Because, for about thirty-two…
Read More →5 Biggest Credit Mistakes Part 2
Part 2 – Not Knowing Your Customer How do you know who you can trust and who you can believe? To figure that out, a Credit Manager needs to know their customer. Ultimately, what you want to know is whether the customer will pay you as they…
Read More →5 Biggest Credit Mistakes Part 1
My name is Jay McKeown and I have been a designated member (CCP) of the Credit Institute of Canada since 1992. I am the Past President and Dean of the CIC, and I have been working in Credit and Collections since 1988. I believe that Credit…
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