If you don't ask, you won't get.

Your main objective - obviously! - is to collect your outstanding accounts as quickly and economically as you can. There are three ways to do that:

• using e-mails and letters
• making telephone calls
• paying visits

The same basic principles apply to all three options:

• If you don't ask you won't get.
• The sooner you ask, the sooner you are likely to get.
• The more you ask for, the more you are likely to get.

The longer an account is overdue, the harder it will be to collect - and the longer you wait before trying to collect an account, the more likely your customer will be to consider that you have accepted the situation and continue to pay at 60 (or even 120!) rather than 30 days.

If yours is a very small company and you're unable to delegate even part of the collection process to someone else, you will likely not have the time to devote the same amount of effort to every account. Where that is the case, concentrate first on those accounts that represent the greatest risk to you - new accounts, customers that have exceeded their credit limit, accounts that have high balances, and customers that have missed the first instalment - and on customers that are consistent and deliberate delinquents.

Yesterday I was talking about how important it is to 'be friendly', reasonable, and accommodating, but post 2008 being 'reasonable and accommodating' involves recognising that attitudes and expectations have to change - and that applies to everybody. The first step toward ensuring that your deliberately delinquent customers understand exactly what your attitudes and expectations are post 2008 - and what theirs ought to be - is to make plans to stop accommodating them, and (if necessary) decide to get rid of them altogether.

Customers who always pay late, or consistently raise queries in order to delay payment are expensive, time-consuming, and a pain to deal with. Unless they are very large customers whose business is vital to the survival of your own Company, they are an expensive, time-consuming pain that you can likely do without. Bad times are good times to come down hard on persistent delinquents and get rid of those who don't get the message: it can't help but improve cash-flow and reduce administration costs.

If, of course, your delinquents are very large customers, then you won't be able to even think about getting rid of them - and it would be very unwise to come down hard and risk being delisted. The Supermarket Code of Conduct was intended to ensure fair trading practices, but despite proposed revision it hasn't done so, and large organisations remain able to bully small traders into accepting iniquitous terms and bad behaviour.