Spanish companies spend, on average, 1,000 euros a year to claim non-payments, without going into legal costs.

The default rate of companies increased, without precedent, in the second quarter of 2021. In fact, the Default Observatory, published by Cepyme, estimates this growth at 15.8% year-on-year. In this sense, the commercial debt with late payment now amounts to 264,567 million euros. It is clear: the figures speak for themselves.

And it is that, as if the bad news that we hear every day were not enough, to the worries of wars, pandemics and shortage crises there is another stumbling block for the business world: a delinquency that supposes a significant cost in terms of financing difficulties. and added interest. Not surprisingly, in the third quarter of 2021, 70.5% of the invoices issued were late in their payment. Thus, it seems clear that this problem is already a threat to the recovery of our economy. But who helps companies?

The answer should be in the law, but it is well known that our country suffers from high rates of bureaucracy, something that many companies understand as helplessness. In fact, according to Cepyme sources, the average for a company to collect an invoice is already 82.5 days. Almost three months in which companies not only suffer profitability difficulties that threaten their viability and growth, but also spend large amounts of time and money claiming invoices. Something that inevitably results in high human resource costs.

What if we had a magic wand to end this problem? The good news is that we don't need a spell for which technology has already found a solution. Thanks to it, we can now automate payments and establish more digital processes. The problem is that companies are the ones that often limit ourselves. In fact, many times we implement different collection channels that lead to a lack of control and a decentralization of information, something that affects important operating costs and, above all, personnel. But, does it also happen in those businesses that we see highly digitized today? The answer is yes, since these types of companies often implement payment gateways that not only entail a high technical cost, but also limit business growth. These gateways have immense geographical limitations, so they cannot be implemented in many countries, something that sounds like a joke in the midst of a globalized era.

In this context, the solution is to implement a universal tool that is integrated into the same system so that any company, without the need for technical knowledge, is able to access different payment processors free of charge and from a single tool, leaving provided that it is the customer who chooses the way in which he wishes to pay and from a single online payment platform.

Working in this way makes it possible to automate future collections, something that eliminates the root of the current problem that many businesses have when encountering returned invoices, with the consequent cost of return, since the platform recovers the collection automatically, something that becomes a vital necessity. According to data from UELZ, Spanish companies spend, on average, 1,000 euros a year to claim non-payments, without going into legal costs. But, in addition, SMEs spend about 100 hours a year on claims and debt management that may not even be recovered if they are not managed efficiently.

With this in mind, what to expect to implement a technology that threatens the high rates of delinquency that the business world is experiencing today? Of course, the cost of it is infinitely lower than what it takes for any company to pursue collections, from start to finish, but, in addition, this will have repercussions on process adjustments and reduction of time for our staff. I am not one of those who thinks that the machine will replace man, because no technology will create itself. We will be the people who will have to stop dealing with manual processes to think and create machines that do them.

Maria Luke, CEO of UELZ