If anybody owes you money, then today, which is Friday 28 February 2020, would be a good day to send them a statement to remind them of the fact. This is just a statement which you are entitled to send: it is not a threat.

 
If anybody owes you money, then today, which is Friday 29 November 2019, would be a good day to send them a statement to remind them of the fact. This is just a statement which you are entitled to send: it is not a threat.

 
It is quite common to invoice a customer with terms of “30 days or nett monthly account”. Small customers will be expected to pay within 30 days, while large customers will be expected to pay at the end of the month following the month of the invoice, so an invoice sent in October 2019 would be settled by Saturday 30 November 2019. Obviously, the average settlement time will be 45 days, but this is OK if the customer’s credit is good.

Large companies insist on doing it this way because they may receive several invoices from a supplier during a month, and will want to settle all of them with a single payment when they do their monthly computerised cheque run. It would therefore be a good idea for the supplier to have sent a statement at the start of November listing all outstanding invoices. Typically the cheque run would be about the 25th of the month, which is today.

If you give credit and have debts to collect, then you might like to have a discussion with us. Most accountants are also general business advisers as well. Some large companies rely upon a cynical calculus of bargaining power when they take ages to settle invoices, and you need to know what to do about this.

The “nett” in “nett monthly account” has “net” as an alternative spelling.

 
If anybody owes you money, then today, which is Wednesday 30 October 2019, would be a good day to send them a statement to remind them of the fact. This is just a statement which you are entitled to send: it is not a threat.

 
It is quite common to invoice a customer with terms of “30 days or nett monthly account”. Small customers will be expected to pay within 30 days, while large customers will be expected to pay at the end of the month following the month of the invoice, so an invoice sent in September 2019 would be settled by Thursday 31 October 2019. Obviously, the average settlement time will be 45 days, but this is OK if the customer’s credit is good.

Large companies insist on doing it this way because they may receive several invoices from a supplier during a month, and will want to settle all of them with a single payment when they do their monthly computerised cheque run. It would therefore be a good idea for the supplier to have sent a statement at the start of October listing all outstanding invoices. Typically the cheque run would be about the 25th of the month, which is today.

If you give credit and have debts to collect, then you might like to have a discussion with us. Most accountants are also general business advisors as well. Some large companies rely upon a cynical calculus of bargaining power when they take ages to settle invoices, and you need to know what to do about this.

The “nett” in “nett monthly account” has “net” as an alternative spelling.

 
One thing we advise clients is to try to have a Unique Selling Proposition. This is something which gives competitive edge which rival businesses cannot copy. Our USP is our use of lots of new technology. We are now using a hybrid optical character recognition/narrative prediction system to process bank statements which nobody else has.

Failing that, try to have a Distinctive Product which fixes you in the minds of your customers. Our primary DP is our use of customised colourful accounts and VAT reports. We also send a lot of colourful e-mails and have spreadsheet proformas to be able to produce them. Internally we tend to colour-code anything and everything in a consistent manner. Blue is companies, red is sole traders, gold is partnerships, green is VAT and yellow is PAYE. So if somebody has some VAT to pay, we send them a green notice with the payment details generated on a spreadsheet. The VAT report we send them has a generally greenish appearance to it, and we do use green stamps!

There is not necessarily a sharp distinction between the USP and the DP. What you do should be either impossible to copy, or at least quite difficult. Try to have one of each. Some of our use of colour has a definite purpose, and some is just for fun.

When we mail out accounts, we use colourful stamps to match the season. Summer stamps have eagles and aeroplanes. September and October stamps tend to have autumnal themes like owls and trees. November stamps will be themed by the Night Mail, which is a Carlisle-centred theme. It’s Star Wars for Christmas. We will be using plain stamps in Lent, but even then it will be unusual denominations and then country definitives just after Lent.

We buy stamps online in batches of at least £50 so it’s post-free, and then assign them to the appropriate time of year. The Post Office supplies the stamps in folders of a type used by philatelists which are very handy for this. Greenish stamps are picked out and put in a separate folder. Often when signed accounts are handed back, we get our stamps back as well, and they go to charity.

 
We advocate that businesses should consider doing some direct mailing to attract new customers. The cost of postage is expensive however. What we do is to do a round of mailing when business is slack, so the cost of direct mailing is the cost of unemployment insurance. It looks quite cheap seen in those terms. We will always be busy.

 
If anybody owes you money, then today, which is Tuesday 30 July 2019, would be a good day to send them a statement to remind them of the fact. This is just a statement which you are entitled to send: it is not a threat.

 
We advocate that every business does a little direct mailing, particularly in its slack period. The cost of a second class stamp is 61 pence, which may make direct mail look too expensive. It is possible to get cheaper rates using metered mail, but then the meter has an up-front cost and we did just say “a little”.

So we do our direct mailing using 61 pence stamps after all, which we buy online. Our choice of stamp is the English Country Definitive, the greyish stamp with the three lions, which doesn’t scream “second class” at the recipient. The Scottish second class Country Definitive is also a nice stamp.

What we can do is to mail or not mail whenever we want, and we can do test mailings and monitor the results. We feel that these advantages outweigh the high cost, so we don’t think it is too expensive for us. Every other business will need to make its own decision, but should do so carefully.

A possible additional benefit of direct mailing is that it drives prospective clients or customers to the website, which means in turn that the website climbs up the rankings in Google searches. We do notice this ourselves when we slacken off with the direct mailing and then resume. Google is somehow aware when a business has other means of promotion, and it responds to help them. Money spent on direct mail is like an insurance against unemployment. If we have plenty of work we slacken off and drop down the Google rankings as well, while if we have nothing to do then a blitz on direct mailing is called for, with the double benefit of heading to the top of Google.

 
If anybody owes you money, then today, which is Friday 28 June 2019, would be a good day to send them a statement to remind them of the fact. This is just a statement which you are entitled to send: it is not a threat.