Ledger360 works by combining businesses’ own ledger information with Experian’s business information, data from thousands of other businesses’ ledgers, current and historical payment behaviour data, including days beyond terms data – showing how long it takes for businesses to pay their bills.

In essence, the system helps businesses to develop more creative collection strategies, speed up payment and take measures to improve their Days Sales Outstanding (DSO), the total amount still owed to their business.

Key benefits of Ledger360 include the ability to:
- See the total cost of overdue debts at single or multiple group level across the business
- Reduce financial risk and fraud, and help make swift collections decisions through access to current and historical ledger information at customer/group level in comparison with Experian trend data
- Highlight and calculate total risk exposure, including over-exposure at regional, group and at consolidated level across linked companies
- Identify those customers who are paying you slower than their other suppliers
- Reduce analysis time and reallocate reporting and analysis resource, measure and compare the in-house team’s performance, set benchmarks and measurable objectives and track performance to ensure that higher levels of individual performance are achieved
- Identify creditworthy prospects on which to focus sales activity, such as those spending beneath their credit limit
- Assess the profitability of increased or renewed credit facilities.

Experian’s risk score, Commercial Delphi, has been integrated into Ledger360 to enable users to determine the financial stability of customers, including their likelihood of business failure. This significantly aids and enhances collections strategies, enabling users to accelerate collections when a customer may be heading towards financial difficulty and won’t be able to pay, or determine credit terms, including getting some customers to pay upfront so that they won’t be left out of pocket.

Jo Howard, Marketing Director of Experian’s Business Information division, said: “Managing ledgers doesn’t have to be a complex business. Ledger360 provides businesses with the ability to understand its ledger in a single view, work with it to reduce bad debt and make faster and more effective collections decisions.

“Businesses are able to consolidate their ledgers, some for the very first time, so that they can see the full risk picture in the one system and identify different collection strategies required to deliver improvements. As a result, financial professionals can identify and thereby reduce their total risk exposure, including DSO. The system also highlights areas of weakness within departments or branches, allowing businesses to improve debt collection targets and align more effective credit policies and limits. For example, businesses are able to see quickly at a glance those accounts at major risk, as well as those customers who are not taking their payment requests seriously.”

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Source : www.experian.com