Company Monitoring helps you to keep a close eye on accounts that are important to your business without the need to regularly check their company reports.
Changes to your customers, suppliers and competitors will continually pose new risks or opportunities for your business. With Creditsafe, you can identify these changes in real-time without the need to manually check their company report, allowing you to act when it matters the most. Simply add them to monitoring and if there are any changes to the company, you will receive an email notification.
Adding your customers to a monitoring list will notify you of any changes in their financial status so you are aware of any risks in advance to avoid them abruptly affecting your operations. New Creditsafe users can automatically monitor a company by simply searching for a report. This company will then be added to a default monitoring portfolio. Alternatively, you can upload a list of companies directly to your selected portfolio.
Monitoring your customers will help you understand their risk if it changes at any point and whether you need to adjust your credit offering to them. This means rather than constantly checking their reports, you’ll be automatically notified by email if anything in their status changes so that you can act proactively rather than be reactive.
Here are some suggestions on the actions you can take based on some of our most common monitoring alerts:
A decrease in credit score and limit
Carefully review your customer account and ensure that any outstanding balance is within the recommended credit limit. You may wish to consider collecting outstanding balances early if the amount outstanding by your customer is far greater than the maximum recommended credit limit.
An increase in credit score and limit
Companies who show signs of positive growth, profitability and demonstrate a history of positive payment behaviour will sometimes receive a credit score and limit increase. Reaching out to these customers and exploring new opportunities to cross-sell and up-sell additional goods or services could prove profitable for you.
Director changes
When a company changes board members or directors it could be a sign that the company is also changing ownership. It's worth reaching out to customers in order to better understand the reason for a change in ownership or directors. Companies who have multiple director changes are more likely to experience financial difficulty.
Company address changes
Receiving alerts about customer address changes allows you to ensure you are sending invoices or goods to the correct address. It's always worth verifying address changes with your customers and updating your internal records.
Many businesses know to credit check their suppliers who are in the UK but seem to overlook this when trading overseas. It’s equally as important to know who you’re working with abroad. More than likely, more investment, time and effort is spent picking your international suppliers and would prove costly if it fails because some quick due diligence was missed out.
There’s always an element of risk - how do you know if your suppliers are financially stable and their financial position is what they say it is? This is why you should thoroughly understand the credit worthiness of everyone you go into business with and be alert to any changes that may arise.
Credit scores can tell you a lot about the current and financial past of a business, revealing information that you may not have known about them. A score takes into account many different factors such as the industry and age of the business, their ability to pay promptly in the past, who is associated with them and the filing of their accounts. It ultimately tells you how financially reliable that business has been in the past and is currently.
Monitoring allows you to keep an eye on your suppliers' activity such as rating, limit and any director changes. Adding your key business accounts to a monitoring list enables you to receive notifications of any changes in their financial status so you can react quickly before it is too late.
Monitoring your suppliers ensures a stable supply chain. It's important to consider exploring alternative suppliers if your current supplier is showing signs of financial distress.
Whether you admit it or not, they're out there and they're targeting your customers. While it might seem unfair given everything else you need to keep on top of in building your business, it is worthwhile you devote time into keeping tabs on your competition.
The good news is monitoring can save you or your employees from spending the time to conduct research on your competitors. By monitoring competitors on an on-going basis, you will be alerted to any changes in their operating state.
Credit checking shouldn’t just be something you do once to be forgotten about afterwards. You should be keeping an eye on any changes in your competitors' financial status or business data continuously. Monitoring does exactly this for you - choose the competitors you want to be alerted on and which changes you want to know about and you’ll receive an email if anything changes.
If a competitor happens to stop trading, this could be an opportunity for you to reach out to their customers and suppliers in order to grow your own business. Keeping track of other changes including mergers and acquisitions often reveals what a competitor is planning in the future and might give your business useful insight.
Track the growth of your competitors. If a competitor is growing quicker than your own business - what are they doing differently?
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Alternatively, why not reach out to your Account Manager for additional support and advice, or schedule a personalised training session with our dedicated Training team.