This is a tricky one in that the USA Administration seems to be rubbishing the claims from BP that the USA organisations that carried out the initial drilling and fitted the well head should also be held responsible for the oil leak disaster. This results in BP as being painted as the only enterprise responsible, so any other organisations that BP had used for other parts of this project might well be disadvantaged in some way. By far the biggest losers might be the shareholders, of which pension funds are in the majority and depend on the dividends to maintain their funds. As for small organisations which have completed contracts or supplied goods for any of the other, larger organisations on the project, it seems unjust if any of them are left with late accounts. For any small enterprise that is left with an late account beyond the agreed completion date their best move might well be to get hold of the large enterprise concerned to understand when it will be cleared. If they don’t get a positive result and the large enterprise doesn’t appear to be going into administration, their best bet might well be to look into Debt Collection to get the account cleared.

The small enterprise might not want to use any time on the Debt Collection project and so might simply pass it on to one of the accepted Debt Collection services; solicitors or Debt Collection Agencies. However if the small enterprise wants to economise and has time, then they might be better investigating taking on the Debt Collection project with their own resources by using Debt Collection Software. The cost difference between solicitors and Debt Collection Agencies, and Debt Collection Software can be significant, depending on the account value, since solicitors and Debt Collection Agencies charge around 10% to 20% or more of the account value. Debt Collection Software can cost around ?40 for a decent system, but of course it does demand enthusiasm and resources from the small enterprise to make Debt Collection Software work.

The small enterprise will need to provide resources of time and people if they are to make good use of the Debt Collection Software, but the people will not be effective if they don’t know what what the job is all about. When checking up on the Debt Collection Software packages, the small enterprise should look at the documentation set to see how good the coaching section is. They will need to be coaching on both the Debt Collection process itself and then the role played by Debt Collection letters. There should be coaching on current legislation and also any useful sentences that Debt Collection Agencies use. The people selected to write the Debt Collection letters should have a good understanding of English so that there are no spelling or grammatical problems in the Debt Collection letters or this could have a detrimental effect on the Debt Collection process, as well as possibly harming the business relationship between the two organisations.

However with sufficient coaching and dedication the small enterprise should be able to use the Debt Collection Software system to encourage the large enterprise to pay the account, at a cheaper cost than solicitors and Debt Collection Agencies charge.