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The automated online credit account opening process involves the applicant completing your bespoke credit application form incorporating your terms and conditions. As part of this process you will receive a credit report on the applicant, you will be alerted to any changes to data held at Companies House and be made aware of any new court information. You will be provided with historical ROSI information on the applicant as well as being registered for ongoing ROSI Monitor notifications.

Save time and free up your staffing resources

Traditional paper based or fax account opening processes can take up to 45 minutes to open an account for each new customer.

The usual process is to receive a phone call from a new prospective customer and to produce and fax a credit account application form (often not fit for purpose) for completion by the applicant.

When the application form is returned it is manually checked for any missing information and then any queries that arise from it need to be dealt with.

The next step may involve logging on to your credit reporting provider, identifying the applicant from the information provided and selecting a grade of credit report relevant to the application. Finally, with the credit account application form and credit report in front of you, you then begin the decision process of whether to supply or not.

Once you have done all this, you then need to inform the applicant in writing of your decision. Assuming that you have agreed to open an account, you then need to input the client details into your own systems.

AccountAssyst performs all this in less than 5 minutes!

If you process 25 credit applications per month this equates to a saving of more than 16 hours staff time per month - 2 full working days!

Based upon a salary of £18k this is a cost of more than £175 per month.

It also accounts for two days per month during which your staff member could be concentrating on more productive matters such as collecting overdue invoices.

As well as saving your business time and money, there are additional benefits provided by the Account Opening process:

1. Being fully aware of who you are dealing with

Limited company, Partnership or Sole Trader? The Account Opening process ensures that you know exactly who you are dealing with by forming your contract to supply with the correct legal entity.

2. Asking the right questions

The credit application process ensures that you collect data that will help you should you experience payment problems with the applicant in the future. This crucial information is not usually collected, nor is it practical to do so, within paper based account opening processes. The vast majority of Credit Account Application Forms are not fit for purpose for when a problem of this type arises – an issue that is often identified all too late.

You can customise and validate the AccountAssyst credit account application form to your specific business needs. For example you may wish to know if there is a fork lift truck onsite to unload goods.

3. Robust terms and conditions

You remain in control by ensuring that the contractual position between you and your new customer is formed on your terms and conditions, which must be agreed by the applicant customer as part of the account opening process. If you don’t have any terms and conditions, this is not a problem. Generic terms and conditions are immediately available for your use if required. Without terms and conditions you are very badly exposed as a business as the burden of proof in any court action is always on the supplier to prove their case. Without agreed terms and conditions you are unlikely to be able to do this easily, if at all.

This can lead to a very expensive lesson in both written off debt and solicitors costs.

4. Credit reporting available on EVERY business

A non-Limited business could have been trading for many years and not have actually been picked up on the radar of any of the credit reporting companies. There may be no available detrimental public information, such as CCJ’s, recorded against them or the business may not subscribe to any of the business directories that the credit reporting companies use to source information.

In these circumstances there will simply be no credit report, no credit limit and not even a record of the existence for this business.

AccountAssyst can offer a credit report and credit limit on any non-Limited business providing that they complete our account opening or existing review process. The credit report and credit limit is based upon the information provided by the applicant and this process is very important as the specific data being collected can also prove extremely useful at a later stage of any recovery process. If this data is not collected in the first place then you cannot exercise this option when you need to.  

Furthermore, the information we request is tailored in conjunction with our own scoring algorithm to provide a far more accurate credit limit than is available from the credit reporting companies. We ask questions that have a direct correlation with the risk associated with the credit applicant.

An example of one of the questions asked is whether the non-Limited company owns a business and / or residential property. From the information provided in the answer, a judgement can be made as to whether property equity would be available to pursue in the event of the applicant defaulting upon a payment.  This information is simply not available anywhere else, nor can it be determined as part of standard credit reporting processes for example.

5. Providing a professional first impression of your business

We have all had the infuriating experience of filling in unwieldy credit application forms. It is a job that very few people enjoy and can often take between 15 and 20 minutes. Inevitably therefore it is human nature to put off such an unattractive task and this can delay your first order from new customers.

With AccountAssyst, this task can be completed in just 2 minutes or less from your customer’s point of view, with full validation of all the information they have entered to ensure the form is completed correctly.

It is unlikely that they will have previously dealt with such a slick credit application process and as such their first impression of your business will be very much one of professionalism and efficiency. This is enhanced by the corporate branding of the credit account application form, customised with your details and logo.