In today’s challenging and difficult economy, businesses of all sizes are facing ever-growing delinquencies in their accounts receivable and mounting debt portfolios. As any organization’s in house debt recovery procedures play a very important job in collecting outstanding, past due debt, most businesses just don’t have the available time, money and skill necessary to collect efficiently and consistently.

In addition, most organizations squander precious money, time and assets, not having a well thought out plan when it comes to collecting their outstanding, past due debts. Most organizations don’t know, for example, that about 90% of successful collections occurs with about 50% of any given debt portfolio. The fact is, many organizations waste precious time going after accounts that aren’t apt to pay at all. The dilemma is which 50% to go after?

Debt scoring is more becoming an effective and cost beneficial tool for companies to better speak to the problem of collecting on their delinquent receivables.

What is debt scoring? Debt scoring is basically a probabilities forecasting model. By employing mathematical algorithms and formulas, scoring has the ability to take your business debt portfolio, and forecast, with precision, a debtor’s likelihood of paying their debts, which accounts are apt to go into default, which are likely to be written off, and which ones to outsource to a collection agency. Debt scoring uses information, such as your own company’s internal accounts receivable and collection performance data, along with other key important information. This can predict, with reasonable accuracy, a customer’s payment pattern and behavior.

Given this kind of valuable information, organizations can arrive at decisions earlier to chart a course of action and collection strategy. Businesses can make these determinations on an account-specific basis.

Below are 3 reasons why your organization should consider debt scoring for your delinquent receivables:

You can direct your internal debt collection efforts on the accounts that are more likely to pay you. This will reduce staffing costs and save time. You can concentrate on the accounts that will pay sooner, and outsource the more “problem” accounts to a debt collection agency.

Debt scoring can help rescue accounts before they go into default. For example, banks and credit unions can better supervise the condition of their loans, checking and share draft accounts. They can then better forecast which accounts to devote more attention on, before they go into default. Again, the more problem accounts can be siphoned off to a collection agency.

With debt scoring, you can employ more custom-made collection strategies, specific to the particular customer, based on the level of difficulty. This again, saves time, money and staffing requirements.

David P. Montana has authored extensively and worked as a business consultant in debt collection agencies services for three decades. David offers much more beneficial tools and information about debt scoring.