Company credit checking before entering into a relationship with them should be an essential part of your standard processes. However, even after undertaking the necessary due diligence, your business is still exposed to the risk that your new partner will begin to suffer financial difficulty and be unable to pay their debts or perform the services you were relying on them for.
To mitigate this risk, it is vital to monitor your business partners for signs of distress. That way, you are alerted to any warning signs so, if necessary, you can pursue any debts, refuse further credit or find an alternative supplier.
To aid in this there are many monitoring tools on the market, but often these are not designed with the practical needs of businesses in mind. Vital warnings can be lost in a disordered sea of irrelevant and trivial alerts that staff members soon stop paying attention to, or missed entirely if the staff member who receives them is absent from the business.
At Red Flag Alert, we understand that businesses need effective monitoring software to be designed and delivered with the customer in mind.
One of the biggest problems with traditional monitoring software, is that it will monitor for many events, most of which do not require your attention. This leads to inboxes being bombarded and cluttered with alerts that are not relevant to your business operation.
The trouble with this, apart from the inconvenience of multiple emails a day, is that monitoring alerts quickly come to be disregarded. Therefore, when a critical alert does come through, it is missed and potentially irreversible damage is done to your cash flow as a result. Often alerts can also only be received by one member of staff and if they are unavailable then, again, vital warnings may be missed.
At Red Flag Alert, we understand these problems. To be effective, monitoring software has to be user-friendly and specifically designed to meet the needs of each individual business.
Our company monitoring tool allows you to segment your monitoring into separate lists. You can customise which of our 86 monitored events will generate an alert, depending on your priorities or business requirements. After all, what is important to look out for in a debtor is different from a prospect. You can then choose to share each list and its alerts with others in your organisation.
To eliminate the issue of email inboxes being clogged by alerts, our platform allows you to select which alerts are critical, and need to be received instantly, and which you would like to receive in a convenient and inbox-friendly daily round-up.
In this way, Red Flag Alert monitoring is clear and concise and ensures that everyone at your business knows what they need to.
With proper presale credit control procedures in place, you can mitigate your exposure to credit risk. However, it is still vital to know what is happening to your debtors or long-term clients on an ongoing basis. This is especially true now, as our economy continues to falter and years of unprecedented macroeconomic pressures leave many companies extremely vulnerable to insolvency.
By monitoring debtors with Red Flag Alert you can gain vital early warnings of financial distress that may speak of a reduced ability to repay, for example, if they receive a CCJ. You are then able to speak to your client and try to recover any finances owed as a priority and also plan accordingly for the potential interruption in your cash flow
If this is a client that is a repeat customer you are then able to start to proactively pursue new prospects to replace their business and minimise any interruption of your cashflow.
One of the most enduring effects of the COVID pandemic is the interruption to supply chains, both global and national, and many are far from recovered. The steep rise in costs, especially fuel, has also added more complications to supply. Spiralling prices have increased insolvencies in the haulage and transport industries, which has further throttled supply. With vastly increased lead times on resources, many must now be ordered months in advance. If a key supplier should fail, it may not be possible to source replacement resources before business processes are interrupted.
Supply companies themselves are no less affected by the current economic climate, with suppliers of materials experiencing significant interruptions and delays. By monitoring your suppliers within Red Flag Alert, you maintain oversight of any potential financial distress. This provides you with the opportunity to find a new supplier before there are any interruptions to your business.
It’s not just companies that you are doing business with that you will benefit from monitoring. By keeping a close eye on prospective clients you can align your marketing and sales strategies to have maximum efficacy.
Should a prospect show positive buying signals and signs of growth, such as increased revenues, assets or a strong Red Flag Alert Health Score, you will know ahead of the wider market and can begin your sales and marketing process in a bespoke, perfectly timed manner.
Not only does this allow you to have a more effective and target process but it can also reduce marketing and prospecting costs as you do less but of a higher quality.
Red Flag Alert have over 20 years of proven success in accurately predicting the early warning signs of financial distress, insolvency and growth. Our background as the in-house software of the UK’s largest insolvency practitioner, Begbies Traynor, means that not only do we approach data differently but understanding business health is in our DNA.
Now a fully independent company, we continue our innovative approach to data. We understand that to be effective for business, data must be understandable, actionable and as current as possible. We pioneer the industry in the speed at which we can bring data to market so our customers can be ahead of their competition. Our platform features such advantages as data feeds that update every 15 minutes, a proprietary growth score and unadvertised petitions.
Our algorithm predicts financial health with an industry-leading 92% accuracy rating and our proven success features being the first to spot such high-profile failures as Carillion, P&O Ferries & Acadia Group and more recently with the Buckingham group.
With your business empowered by our B2B data and monitoring tool, you can be sure that all staff across your business will have the data they need when they need it.
Get a free trial of our platform today and see how Red Flag Alert will empower and protect your business!