SMEs, the 8 levers to increase your cash flow for sure

Are you a manager or financial executive of an SME and are you struggling to finance your company’s working capital?

What if the solution was on your customer side?

Here are 8 key points to analyze to help you save 10 to 15 days on your payment deadlines and reduce costs related to the management of your customer accounts.

From prospecting to invoice payment, the audit will allow you to identify potential levers for improvement across your entire customer base to accelerate your collections and sustainably improve your WCR.

1 – Do you know your customers’ payment circuit?

The customer file is the foundation of your business, it is a real tool for communicating well with your customers.

Also, do not neglect the importance of knowing all your points of contact with each of your customers: sales, marketing, logistics, finance, debt collection, etc.

Opening an account (or a contract) is the ideal time to fully understand your customers’ internal circuits (legal information, commercial information, administrative information, information on ordering parties, delivery addresses but also billing center, commercial and accounting contact, etc.).

Ask your customers for all the information necessary for smooth administrative procedures.

2 – Are your general terms and conditions of sale well written?

The T&Cs structure your business relationship throughout the sale. They must:

• Must be accepted by your customers,
• Integrate all regulatory obligations,
• Frame the mode of operation of the contract throughout the sales process.

3 – Is your billing circuit well defined?

Be sure to faithfully fill in the billing information requested by the customer (order reference, site, etc.). From the warehouse worker to sales administration, everyone must be vigilant.

Implement traceability of outgoing invoices to avoid both blocking and loss of documents in the validation circuit.

If you have not yet taken the plunge into dematerialization, don’t wait any longer and implement electronic invoicing now (mandatory from September 1, 2026 for all companies).

Several advantages to this:
• You will significantly reduce processing times,
• You will reduce your invoice sending costs (€1 on average for an electronic invoice vs. €9 for a paper invoice)
• You will no longer lose attached documents.

4 – Is your dispute management process well established and shared across departments?

Identifying and managing disputes helps increase customer satisfaction by resolving their problem as quickly as possible.

Raise awareness among all stakeholders involved in your sales cycle, determine the roles and responsibilities of each person, this is your guarantee that disputes are properly taken into account by all stakeholders internally.

There are different types of disputes, the handling of which may be different due to their nature. For good dispute management, define:

• The employees/departments in charge of handling disputes depending on their nature. A dispute related to a price error on the invoice may be resolved by the sales administration while a technical dispute concerning an intervention at your customer’s premises will be taken into account by your sales department or your technician.
• Processing times by type of dispute (price, quality, administrative, date of event, missing material, double billing, etc.). A price dispute, simple to control and process, must be resolved within 8 days maximum, or even less, when a quality dispute can be more complicated to resolve and take more time.

It is therefore necessary to categorize disputes to improve their processing and thus increase the satisfaction of your customers. A satisfied customer will respect the due dates of invoices.

5 – Have you defined a process for managing outstanding amounts and monitoring risks?

For each customer, it is important that you can define the maximum outstanding level that you can grant them.

Implementing a simple management process will allow you to measure the quality of your clients’ financial structure.

Monitoring will allow you to receive all legal changes or payment incidents from your customers and thus gain in responsiveness and avoid non-payments.

6 – Have you defined a settlement policy?

It is important to define your payment methods and conditions, then communicate them to your customers, in particular by integrating them into your general conditions of sale.

Also ensure that sales representatives are familiar with the various channels, that they are aware of the LME, and that they include payment conditions in commercial negotiations.

7 – The recovery circuit: internal or external?

If you are handling debt collection internally, it is essential that your organisation has the means to do its job. Make sure that:

• Your recovery team’s goals are clear to everyone,
• Your employees are motivated and well trained,
• Your processes, methods, and tools are modern and adapted,
• Your recovery strategies are tailored to each of your customers.

If you outsource, choose a specialist debt collection partner :

• Who will know how to preserve your image,
• Who has a stable and experienced team,
• Who has an international team if you have receivables abroad,
• Who has modern and efficient tools to calmly process large volumes and/or complex files.
• Who has a win-win approach and offers success fees
• Who remains flexible if you are still hesitant to outsource, and who can offer to test it on a short mission.

8 – Have you implemented relevant dashboards?

Dashboards can help you better manage your customer accounts by allowing you to monitor the evolution of your customer outstandings in real time.

In detail, they will help you:

• Manage customer outstanding debts (undue outstanding debts, due outstanding debts, top 10, top 20, etc.),
• Have a clear view of delays by aging (aged balance) for targeted recovery actions,
• Organize and monitor recovery actions of recovery teams,
• Manage unidentified and unaccounted for payments,
• Qualify disputes, causes of blocking or late payment of debts.
• If you keep them simple, intuitive, and updated daily, your recovery actions will be easier and you will recover your cash quickly.

For each step, structure your analysis. The quality of your report, in the sense of added value, will help improve the organization to reach the target. This quality of report is the result of your audit process, which is based on:

1. Preparation for the audit
2. The relevance of the interviews
3. The technique used for note-taking

You may be wondering whether to carry out this audit internally or entrust it to an external consultant? An external perspective will allow you to benefit from best practices through the contribution of the consultant’s multi-sector experience, continuous monitoring of the profession, regulations and tools of market players.