Spring Time Software

A publisher came to me frustrated.

Not about sales. Not about returns.
But about cash stuck in debtors for months — sometimes years — with no clear visibility on who owed what, or why.

Their receivables had ballooned.
Follow-ups were happening on gut feel.
Credit was still being extended to accounts that hadn’t cleared old dues.

The team wasn’t selling — they were firefighting.

Within six months of fixing the process, their debtors reduced by 40%.

Here’s what actually changed — and what didn’t.

What did NOT change:
1.Their relationships
2.Their sales team
3.Their distributor network
4.Their pricing

No one was fired. No one was blamed.

What DID change:

1. Visibility came before action
Earlier, outstanding dues were tracked in spreadsheets — updated once a month (or whenever someone remembered).
We moved to real-time ageing reports by account, region, and channel.

The team could finally see the problem before it became a crisis.

2. Credit decisions stopped being informal
Orders were being dispatched to accounts with 90+ day dues — not out of negligence, but habit and relationship pressure.

We introduced simple rules:
No fresh dispatch beyond a threshold without a clearance flag.

There was resistance for two weeks. Then it stopped — because data made tough conversations easier.

3. Follow-ups became systematic, not personal
Chasing payments is awkward when it’s one person calling another.

We built structured follow-up cycles:
Automated reminders at 30, 45, and 60 days.

The process started doing the chasing — not the relationship.
The team could focus only on accounts that actually needed intervention.

4. Reconciliation became continuous
In the book trade, disputes around returns, damages, and short supplies are common.

Unresolved disputes quietly turn into “dead” debtors.

We shifted reconciliation from a quarterly task to a weekly discipline.

The technology wasn’t complex.

A structured ageing report. A credit flag on the dispatch system. An automated reminder sequence. Tools most businesses already have access to.

What mattered was understanding exactly where the process was breaking — and fixing that, instead of copying “best practices” from another industry.

If your debtor days are rising and your team is chasing the same accounts every month, the problem is rarely your people.

It’s the process underneath.