Streamlining credit checking: How Sling can help

Credit checking a prospective client is an important step in managing financial risk, protecting against fraud, and ensuring that businesses are making informed decisions before entering into a financial agreement. It covers a number of risk factors:

1. Assessing creditworthiness: The primary reason for credit checking is to confirm the creditworthiness of the prospective client. This involves evaluating the client's credit history, payment behavior, outstanding debts, and other financial factors that could affect their ability to pay any debt or financial obligation.
2. Mitigating financial risk: Credit checking can help mitigate financial risk by identifying clients who may be at a higher risk of defaulting on a payment. This information can help businesses make informed decisions about whether to enter into a financial agreement with a prospective client.
3. Ensuring payment: Credit checking can also help ensure payment by identifying clients who have a history of paying their debts on time and in full. This information can give businesses confidence that their invoices will be paid without too much chasing.
4. Protecting against fraud: Credit checking can help protect businesses against fraudulent activity by identifying clients who have a history of fraudulent behavior or who have been involved in financial scams.

Our workflow building tool, Sling, uses a system of input forms and approval gateways to help manage business processes, such as lead generation and bidding for work. Sling allows new leads to be quickly captured and acted upon, with staged signoff gateways ensuring management oversight.

One of our current clients have configured a credit checking gateway early on in their project enquiry workflow. As soon as a prospective client company is known, their details are checked with Creditsafe and the resulting credit rating is used to help approve or reject the enquiry.

Different credit ratings can be handled in the appropriate manner - a high rating can automatically approve the enquiry and allow it to proceed, while a middling rating may alert the financial team and require their signoff. In contrast, a low rating may reject the enquiry outright. In Sling, all these options are configurable.

In some cases, the manual signoff process may take a little time, which is why we added the "Uncertain" option to the manual singoff form. A member of the finance team can mark the gateway as "Uncertain" which allows the bid to proceed, but flags up the hesitancy to rest of the users. This avoids bottlenecks in the enquiry process - ensuring a swift response to opportunities while retaining a responsible approach to financial risk.

Sling has many other features to improve process management workflows. From allowing lead detail capture directly in Outlook, to synchronisation with existing contact and staff databases, to CRM-style note-taking, it's chock-full of features to help businesses effectively manage their most important business processes.