Free Credit Control Resources: Google

Do you use Companies House to help you with your Credit Control? If not you should! In our opinion, the Companies house webcheck service is a much under used resource that we are going to shout about from the roof tops in order to help reduce your exposure to bad debt!

Their webCheck service allows you to get lots of invaluable information on any UK Limited Company. You can check companies out by name or by using their company registered number. Even if you don’t know the precise name of the company, you can find them by simply typing in the first few letters of their name and tabbing through the list until you find them

You can establish basic information such as:

•   Date the company was incorporated (this is useful to help you assess whether or not you wish to do business with a new prospect. If it is newly incorporated, you may wish to ask for full payment upfront, or a deposit, or put them on an automated form of payment, such as; Direct Debit or Continuous Payment Authority)
•   Company Type
•   Nature of Business (SIC Code)
•   Accounting Reference Date
•   Last Accounts Made up to
•   Next Accounts Due (This is very useful and will highlight if they are late filing their accounts. Normally, if accounts are filed late, this is a red flag and means that the company is in some form of financial difficulty)
•   Last Annual Return Made up to
•   Next Annual Return Due (This is also very useful and will highlight if they are late filing their annual return. If annual returns are filed late, again, this is a red flag and means that the company is more than likely in some form of financial difficulty)

All the above information is free; you can however download copies of annual returns and company accounts directly from companies’ house website for a nominal fee. However, unless you are an accountant, it can be difficult to assess a company’s creditworthiness from a set of accounts.

We would suggest that you always check out new customers using companies house WebCheck service. This is better than not checking them out at all and will at least give you more of an idea as to their creditworthiness. If for example a prospect is late filing their accounts and or annual return, we would suggest that you check them out further by doing a credit check on them.

WebCheck via Companies House is a very useful service and if used wisely, it will certainly help you to reduce your exposure to bad debt.

The safest way of checking out a prospect though is to obtain a credit report on them.

  

Jamieo "Making Your Cash Flow"

 

 

Jamieo "Making Your Cash Flow"

 

Comments

[Ian Ayliffe]

Great blog here and completely agree that there should always be a plan of action and searching on Google is certainly a way forward to avoiding debt or alternatively there is always the option to credit check companies to reduce that initial risk?

[Sales Productivity]

It's true that 'free' sources can be useful, especially at the initial research stage. However paid sources is more useful when you need deeper info. And this is where 'paid' sources can make a difference. It might therefore be better to think about it on a case to case basis.