June 8th, 2010 by Alex Coté
So you landed the big client, performed your job to perfection and invoiced them for your work. The clock starts ticking. Three weeks go by and you ask your customer about your payment. “Let me check with AP.” A few more weeks go by as you work with other clients and still nothing yet. Another [...]
June 4th, 2010 by Alex Coté
As a freelancer or independent consultant the last thing you think about is getting paid. It’s usually all about selling your skill set and experience to a potential client. The assumption is that your new, often much larger, client is capable of paying your invoices in a timely manner. While this might be true, there [...]
May 5th, 2010 by Alex Coté
Over the last couple of weeks there have been a number of media outlets from the Wall Street Journal to Bloomberg BusinessWeek to Clark Howard at CNN all covering the same topic: Freelancers struggling to get paid. Clark Howard’s blog post yesterday hit the point home: “I think there should be a website where independent [...]
November 12th, 2009 by Alex Coté
When we launched the Cortera Credit Exchange our primary goal (it still is) was to drastically augment the amount of information available on private companies by expanding the information sharing between credit grantors of all forms. I’m happy to report that we are seeing that exact behavior every day. Another intriguing trend is one that [...]
October 30th, 2009 by Alex Coté
Earlier I blogged about a story by George Cloutier in BusinessWeek’s The Turnaround Ace blog. Now that I’ve had some time to fully digest it, I have to say his advice is not only bad, but it’s also flat out wrong. Worse, it’s downright dangerous. It’s exactly the kind of counsel that can cause confusion [...]
October 29th, 2009 by Alex Coté
An article in BusinessWeek’s Turnaround Ace blog entitled “To Improve Cash Flow, Stall Payments to Vendors” is causing quite the reader negative reaction. The gist of the article: You should pay your vendors as slow as possible to help manage cash flow (in good time and bad). For the profiled company in the article they [...]
October 22nd, 2009 by Alex Coté
The good news: The vast majority of your customers and partners are paying their bills on time. The bad news: The delinquent minority is only getting worse. Having access to the A/R activities of millions of businesses provides us with a unique view into the nation’s cash flow. And since the beginning of the year, [...]
September 2nd, 2009 by Jim Swift
In case you missed it, there was a great front page article yesterday in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Big Firms Are Quick To Collect, Slow to Pay” about how, you guessed it, the biggest companies are speeding up their collections efforts while slowing payment to their small business partners. In essence big companies are [...]
May 20th, 2009 by Alex Coté
You might have noticed that we launched a new, satirical marketing campaign a couple of weeks ago to help bring attention to the important and increasingly difficult commercial accounts receivable management function. Now more than ever it is essential that organizations operate at peak performance across all levels of risk management, yet often times credit [...]
January 26th, 2009 by Alex Coté
Commercial Credit & Collections Professionals (within corporations and at 3rd party collections agencies) face one of the most challenging collections environments in a generation. With the economy in a recession and with many banks unable or unwilling to provide debt financing, companies are being forced to rely more and more on their vendors to finance [...]
