By William Brennan, Associate
With the start of the New Year many people sit down to look at how they did financially in the previous year. One thing that many people discover is that while they have spent a lot of time working they haven’t necessarily been paid for all of their work. These outstanding accounts can make what should have been a great year into a poor year. The following are a few tips on ways to help collect those hard earned dollars.
- Make sure that all of your invoices are up to date
People only pay their bills after they receive them. Many hardworking people focus all of their effort on putting in long hours and doing excellent work, they unfortunately do not take the time to promptly send bills to their customers. Keeping up with billing for the work you do is just as important as completing the work in the first place.
- Send a reminder letter
A politely worded reminder letter to a customer with an outstanding account will often encourage them to pay their outstanding account. The New Year is an excellent opportunity for this, a polite letter wishing your customers a happy New Year, thanking them for their business and finally reminding them about the outstanding account can be a simple yet effective way of collecting on outstanding accounts.
- Have a lawyer send a letter on your behalf
Unfortunately, a polite reminder letter does not always work. When a customer is either ignoring or refusing your requests for payment you may consider asking a lawyer to write a demand letter on your behalf. A firmly worded demand letter from a lawyer is sometimes enough to prompt a customer to either pay the outstanding account in full or start a conversation on how to resolve the outstanding account.
- Start a lawsuit
Finally if all options have failed you could consider starting a lawsuit seeking payment of your outstanding account. This is not a step to be taken lightly; you can generally assume that every lawsuit that you are involved with will cost you both time and money. These costs must be balanced against any amounts that you may potentially recover if your lawsuit is successful.