From 17 till 19 October the Credit Research Foundation organized the Credit & Accounts Receivable Open Forum in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. During this three day event approximately 200 people joined the sessions and forums which were presented by several USA credit professionals.
The first two days consisted of a total of 10 sessions with subjects such as electronic payments, remittance processing, customer deductions and of course accounts receivable management. The conference started with a macro economic analysis of the current situation and the economic outlook for the coming period. Interesting to see that the credit professionals in America struggle with the same problems regarding credit management as the professionals in Europe: How to handle customers with disputes and the extended payment terms which the customer dedicates.
One of the subjects which was heavily discussed, was e-invoicing and e-dunning. There are great differences in the way people think about this subject. Some say that by sending the invoices via email they save a lot of time which they would otherwise have to spend on printing the letters and sending them out via the post. But others say that they now have to spend this time on keeping their email database up to date and resending invoices because they were bounced. Not to forget the tracing of invoices which will be stuck in the SPAM. Another part of the discussion focused on adapting the invoicing process to Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) environments, which does not guarantee that manual checks are not necessary anymore.
During the event the results of the CRF’s Survey 2011 were also presented. 420 credit & collections management professionals participated in this survey, which has shown interesting results. 25% of the participants businesses uses Collection Management Software, of which 30,2% only have been using it for 1 to 3 years. Though 32% is planning to implement this technology in the next 3 years. Another interesting fact was that only 3,2% uses Root Cause Analysis Software and 24,7% uses Scorecard/Reporting/Dashboard software. Although it may seem as if American companies are leaders in this market, the penetration of credit and collections management software was quite low.
To conclude, the Credit & Accounts Receivable Open Forum was an interesting event with lots of opportunities to gain and share knowledge and meet others in the industry