Accountability provides an extremely effective tool to be firm with your customers.  Often astute business practices command respect as apposed to diminishing respect. 

For some business owners, this listing-on-the-credit-bureau process requires a paradigm shift.  This listing-tool does not need to be used as a big-stick threatening tool, it can be used as a completely professional business tool.  With some real consequences, you can now be the one staying calm and maintaining your professional customer service.  A perfect example would be for your debt collector (perhaps yourself) to say to a defaulter

'you leave me no choice, you have promised payment for the last three weeks and I have no choice but to black list you.  We are not a financial institution and we are not a charity organization, we have salaries and rent to pay and we need our money now.  You leave us no choice'.

Another paradigm shift some business owners need is the realization that the money owed to them is their money.  A business is not a bank, a lending institution and while they have your money, you are busy financing some other part of their cash flow.  If is often worse when money owed to you is financing the defaulters car of holiday.  When you have paid for the raw material and for the labour, the money owed to you, belongs to you.  It is surprising to meet soft hearted business owners.  The choice is yours.  Is it your money in their pocket or are you passively going to wait for it to come to you?

The other paradigm shift some owners need is that being listed on the credit bureau is not the end of a person or busines' life, it merely places a warning sign above their heads.  The major institutions have made is policy not to borrow money to default payers but this does not mean that business owners cannot get money from friends, family or loan sharks.  Your listing could in actual fact be a kindness in disguise if the bad payer does not know how to manage their cash flow. 

Another way to be firm with your customers is to bring about an awareness of their credit worthiness being at stake if they do not pay on time.  Our clients asked us to develop an invoice sticker which is working wonders in some industries.  View an example of the Accountability sticker on the example section.  The stickers are also available electronically if you do electronic invoicing.

Be firm with your customers and you will not regret it.  Build in on-time incentives if need be, but don't finance your clients operation as infinitum.

This business tool is to be used at your discretion.  You decide when and on whom to use it.  Obviously with repeat customers, where you don't want to offend them and jeopardize ongoing business you need to increase your soft skills while at the same time using the listing process.

If you think that using the Accountability stickers would help your business processes you can >>regsiter now<<.