Offering training to your clients: why financiers do it

On a factoring facility, the financier’s own team collects the debts. On a confidential invoice discounting or client-collects facility, the client does. That means the person chasing the debtors, banking the receipts and preparing the month-end figures your facility depends on works for your client, not for you.

Often that person has never been told how the facility works. They were hired to do credit control for a business, and the facility arrived later as something the finance director arranged. They may not know why receipts must go into the trust account, why credit notes need to be reported, or why an auditor wants to see delivery notes.

Training them is one of the simplest things a financier can do to protect its lending.

The problems training prevents

Many of the issues that show up at audit are not fraud. They are a credit controller doing what seemed sensible, without knowing the rules:

• Receipts banked in the wrong account. A debtor pays the client’s old account and the payment is simply posted to the ledger. The funded debt is cleared, but the cash never reaches the financier.
• Credit notes raised late, or not reported. The ledger stays higher than it should be, and dilution is understated until the next audit finds it.
• Disputes that nobody mentions. A debtor is withholding payment over a quality issue, but the funder only finds out when the invoice goes over the cut-off.
• Month-end figures that don’t reconcile. The ledger, the bank and the funder’s records disagree, and every month starts with a reconciliation exercise.
• Audits that take longer than they need to. The credit controller doesn’t know what evidence the auditor needs, so documents arrive late or incomplete.

Each of these costs the financier time, and some of them cost money. Most can be avoided if the person running the ledger understands why the rules exist.

What client training covers

Our Credit Control for Clients library is written for exactly this person. Its seven courses cover:

• How Your Funding Works and Why Collections Matter
• Your Facility’s Rules for Credit Control
• Banking and Allocating Customer Payments
• Reporting to Your Funder
• Disputes and Credit Notes: Telling Your Funder
• Working with Your Funder’s Verification and Audits
• When a Customer Can’t Pay

It also shares four collecting courses with Effective Credit Control, and two case scenarios from the client’s side of the facility: Month-End Pressure, where payroll is due and the finance director wants the ledger to look better than it is, and The Customer in Trouble, where the biggest customer is ordering more and paying less.

What the credit controller gets from it

Training is not only for the financier’s benefit. A credit controller who understands the facility can explain to their own finance director why a receipt must go to the trust account, why a credit note can’t wait until next month, or why the auditor needs the delivery notes. They spend less time on queries from the funder and less time reconciling figures at month end. And they learn collecting skills, through the shared courses on calls, excuses, promises and written chasers, that make their main job easier.

Why financiers offer it

It reduces risk on facilities you already have. Cleaner ledgers, prompter reporting and fewer misbanked receipts make every facility easier to manage and every audit simpler.

It improves the relationship. Clients see training as a benefit, not a requirement. A financier that helps a client’s team do its job well is a financier the client wants to stay with.

It sets expectations early. Training a new client’s credit controller during onboarding means the facility starts as it should continue, rather than being corrected after the first audit.

It’s delivered in your name. The library can carry your logo, colours and fonts, so your clients see training from their funder, not from a third party.

Making it work

A few practical points help:

1. Offer it at onboarding. The best time to train a client’s credit controller is in the first month of a new facility.
2. Offer it again when people change. A new credit controller at an existing client needs the same grounding. Your client managers usually hear about staff changes first.
3. Follow up after audits. If an audit finds misbanked receipts or late credit notes, pointing the client to the relevant course is more useful than a list of findings alone.
4. Track completion. Knowing which clients’ teams have completed the training tells your client managers where to focus.

Why it’s worth doing

Training your clients doesn’t replace audits, verification or good credit control on your own side. But it addresses a root cause of many audit findings: a person doing an important job without being told how it works.