ExtendCredit.com Blog

This is the sixth installment in our series, "Establishing Best Practices for Extending Credit in Today's Economy."

In our previous blog posts, we discussed getting organized to offer credit to your customers, best practices for processing credit applications and creating credit agreements, and ensuring payment.

In this blog post, we will focus on best practices for handling missed payments and defaults.

Strategies for Handling Missed Payments and Defaults
While automating the payment process using electronic debit to a borrower's bank account greatly reduces the risk of payment default, missed payments still occur and can lead to loan defaults. So given that we followed best practices during the application process and are using automated payment processing, what steps are recommended for handling missed payments? Automated payments fail for a variety of reasons. Assuming payments are made via ACH, a payment may fail due to insufficient account funds a closed account . Generally, sending a payment reminder to the borrower prior to each payment due date will ward off these issues before they occur; but when they still happen, it is best to immediately contact the borrower to discuss the missed payment and agree upon corrective action such as an immediate payment to get back on track.

Taking manual payments to correct a missed payment forces the issue with the borrower. They have to respond to your request by either coming into your office with a payment, authorizing an immediate debit of their bank account, or providing you with a credit card for payment. If they decline to correct the situation immediately by seeking a delay in payment or declining to honor the payment agreement, you know that you have a more serious potential default situation. Even in these extreme situations, being able to restructure the terms of their original payment agreement with you might be the trick to avoiding a true default.

However, if it is clear that a default situation is occurring, it is best to immediately hand off that account to outside collections for processing. This provides two benefits to you:

First, delinquent accounts that sit unpaid for more than 30 days become uncollectable very quickly. Studies show that unpaid accounts that are 60 days or more past due have less than a 50 percent probability of being collected at all.

Second, it shows the borrower you "mean business" and often prompts them to agree to take action to correct the default situation. At this point, you should have established guidelines outlining what your business is willing to accept to resolve a default and who is authorized to offer this deal to the borrower.

For example, your policy might dictate that an email payment reminder is sent five days prior to the due date for a payment. If the payment is missed, a representative contacts the borrower by telephone to discuss the situation and resolve the problem. During this call the representative pushes for immediate payment via one of the accepted forms of payment.

If the borrower cannot make immediate payment to correct the default, an inquiry is made regarding possible special arrangements to correct both the current and possible future situations. These special arrangements might include restructuring the payment agreement to change the payment amount, changing the monthly due date, or in extreme cases, moving to settle the debt at a discount with one or two payments. Approval of any special arrangement would typically require someone other than the representative to approve the arrangement and also for the borrower to consent to the new arrangement in writing.

If none of the above actions corrects the default, the account should be sent to outside collections. However, the objective before taking this path should be to settle the debt at a lower overall cost compared to what could be expected using an outside collections service. Since each situation will be unique, multiple steps with associated escalation points should be employed to quickly filter payment problems to only those hard default cases.

Using an outside third-party service for both the soft collections and hard collections processes can be a cost-effective and efficient option for many businesses. Using a third party relieves your staff of the uncomfortable burden of handling collections and frees their time to do what they do best - serve your customers. Fees vary depending on the scope of services and the delinquency of the accounts involved. There are many options available, so it is best to shop around for a provider that understands your business, has a good reputation, and is competitively priced. Services, such as ExtendCredit.com, even include soft collections in the bundle of capabilities provided to their customers.

Effective Automation is Key Just like all the steps leading up to this point in the process, automation is key to ensuring the best results. Handling missed payments and defaults manually is time consuming, stressful, and risky. Automated payment reminder emails reduce missed payments. Effective automation to alert, list and manage payment issues keep needed visibility around the issue and organize the workflow involved in resolving these situations. Integration with outside collection services for hard default situations provides up-to-the-minute status updates regarding where those accounts are in the collections process and simplifies communications with the outside service provider.

A robust, easy-to-use system coupled with service provider staffing to conduct soft collections activity on your behalf provides a rich set of capabilities to maximize results even for a small business with limited staff.

In our final blog post on "Establishing Best Practices for Extending Credit in Today's Economy," we will summarize our best practice recommendations and discuss how applying automation to the full lifecycle maximizes your results from extending credit to your customers.

This is the fifth installment in our series, "Establishing Best Practices for Extending Credit in Today's Economy." In our previous blog posts, we discussed getting organized to offer credit to your customers, best practices for processing credit applications and creating credit agreements.

In this blog post, we will focus on best practices for ensuring payment.

Strategies for Getting Paid
There are several common forms of payment that businesses accept." Cash is always a welcome form of payment, though a poor choice for debt repayment because of potential theft and control issues with staff."

Accepting checks is also a poor payment method for debt repayment because of identity verification and NSF risks." However, it is a common approach for manually run payment plans." In these situations, the business obtains a series of checks from the customers representing the total number of payments to be made and then each month deposits one of the checks as payments come due." While this might seem like a simple approach, the risk can be high." Future checks could bounce and incur NSF fees for the business and cause collections issue." Also, the staff has to remember to deposit each check on time and keep the other checks secure from theft.

Accepting credit or debit cards as payment are a more effective payment option, but carry a higher transaction cost for the business." Merchant fees associated with credit and debit cards can range from 1.5 percent to 6 percent of the transaction amount." Even under this approach, the business still needs to remember to process the payment each month and deal with failed payments due to expired credit cards or insufficient credit available." Most businesses know that manually reconciling credit card transactions is time consuming and challenging, which is an added cost above the transaction fee.

Automatic debit of a customer's bank account is cost effective and efficient." This process, which uses the ACH network, is the preferred payment method for professional lenders and other businesses that manage large volumes of recurring monthly payments." The transaction cost associated with a successful ACH transaction is much lower than a credit card transaction; and if a payment is unsuccessful, there is no charge to the business for NSF handling like there would be with a bad check." While ACH payments are more cost effective to the business, there is a tradeoff of several days delay in receiving payment into the business bank account due to the way ACH transactions get processed by the banking system." The good news is that once an ACH transaction settles, there is very little risk of the transaction being reversed — unlike a credit card transaction that provides a long time period for the credit card holder to challenge a transaction.

So What Forms of Payment Should a Business Accept Under a Payment Plan? 
Following the lead of professional lenders, it is recommended that payments be handled automatically via periodic ACH transactions directly debiting the borrower's bank account." As an alternative, for cases where the borrower doesn't have a bank account but does have a prepaid debit card, payments could be tied to the prepaid debit card at a cost to the merchant similar to those paid for credit card transactions.

Using credit cards for loan payments is frowned upon by the credit card companies and should be avoided to ensure credit card agreements are not violated. Accepting checks or cash should be avoided except as manual payments since they involve greater risk and more effort by the business.

Effective Automation is Key
Automating the payment process for recurring payments pays big benefits to a business." It reduces repayment risk, lowers transaction-handling costs, and frees your staff to spend their time more effectively." Additionally, automated payment platforms provide a robust set of capabilities and reporting to assist with the overall payment process and help efficiently perform reconciliation and settlement tasks.

Unfortunately, payment-processing services come with a range of services and capabilities making selecting the best service provider often difficult." Making your selection solely based on price often results in more work for the business as it will need to stay in control of the entire process." The lack of integration with the overall lending process also impedes the effectiveness of standalone payment processing services since this integration is critical for the overall management and control of the lending process.
 
A robust, easy-to-use system that is integrated with the lending platform provides a rich set of capabilities to maximize results for even a small business with limited staff.In our next blog post on "Establishing Best Practices for Extending Credit in Today's Economy," we will discuss best practices for handling missed payments and defaults.

This is the fourth installment in our series, "Establishing Best Practices for Extending Credit in Today's Economy."

In our previous blog post, we discussed strategies to consider in developing your customer credit program. One of these is deciding which procedures or types of transactions to include in the program and what types of customers will be eligible for credit.

In this blog post, we will focus on the second part: deciding which types of customers will be eligible for credit.

Strategies for Assessing Credit Risk
When it comes to deciding who is eligible for extended payment terms and who is not, the decision should be based on a defined business strategy for offering credit and then on criteria that is consistently applied to all applicants.

First, let’s discuss strategies for offering credit. A properly designed credit program serves a business purpose. This may be to stimulate sales, provide a financing option to customers, or supplement an outside financing program. Within the context of the business purpose, a decision should be made regarding how much credit risk is acceptable.

For example, if the business purpose is to stimulate sales of a service, but stringent criteria are set for credit approval, the business may find a higher than desired percentage of applicants is declined. On the other hand, setting more lenient credit criteria may result in higher missed payments and bad debt situations. That said, it may be acceptable if the service is highly leveraged in terms of cost of sale, and the increased business volume generates additional profits that justify the bad debt dollar risk.

Credit risk should be assessed based on the business purpose and should be well understood prior to commencing the program. The business should develop financial models around the program to establish performance benchmarks that are monitored. Adjustments should be made along the way if performance is deviating from the benchmarks so that the business purpose is achieved as originally envisioned.

The second aspect of assessing credit risk is the consistent application of credit criterion to all applicants. This seems like a simple concept, but unfortunately, one that is often not followed. This can be avoided, by establishing clear, written credit criterion and a monitoring process to enforce policy compliance and external lending rules.

Effective Automation is Key
Automating the credit application, approval/denial process, and credit agreement stages of the payment plan process ensures consistency and can enforce best practices. Automation can go as far as to define the business rules for the credit granting process so that the approval/denial tasks are executed consistently irrespective of the individual processing the application.

One of the key aspects of the credit review and approval process is running credit and identity verifications on each applicant to obtain information regarding their credit worthiness while verifying his/her identity. An integrated, real-time service should be a required feature of any automated lending system.

Effective automation not only eliminates error-prone manual processes it can enforce lending best practices and significantly reduce the workload for existing staff. A robust, easy-to-use system provides a rich set of capabilities to maximize results even for a small business with limited staff.

In our next blog post on "Establishing Best Practices for Extending Credit in Today's Economy," we will more fully explore best practices for ensuring prompt payments.

This is the third in our series, "Establishing Best Practices for Extending Credit in Today's Economy".

In our previous Best Practices’ blog post, we discussed the value of developing a written plan for extending credit and formalizing the credit process. As part of developing an overall strategy behind offering credit to your customers, you should decide which procedures or types of transactions to include in the program and what types of customers will be eligible for credit.

In this blog post, we will focus on the first part: deciding which procedures or types of transactions to include in the program.

Leveraged Transactions
Leveraged transactions or procedures of all sizes are good candidates for selling on credit terms. Why? Because the fee you charge is high compared to the hard cost you incur to provide the service or procedure. Couple this with requiring a down payment and/or charging interest over the term of the payment plan, and lending risk can be minimized or eliminated, while growing the business and generating a high level of wealth creation for the owner(s).

Let’s look at an example from the dental market and also compare this to the results you obtain using outside of third-party financing.

To start, outside financing may seem attractive on the surface because the dentist gets paid immediately. If the need for immediate cash flow is critical to the dentist, an outside financing program is an option that should be considered. However, the dentist does take a discount on their fees and the lender will only approve certain patients. Also, only certain procedures are eligible for financing often at less than 100 percent financing. As a result, the dentist's revenue potential from the highly leveraged procedure is severely limited because the outside finance company dictates who gets financed and how much is covered. Considering that highly leveraged procedures are a good way to grow a practice and create wealth for the dentist, outside financing is not the best option for achieving these goals.

It's interesting that service providers, such as dentists, are willing to take, for example, a 10 percent discount on their fees which happen to be 28 percent of their profits (based on the national average overhead of 73 percent). This isn't generating wealth for the dentist rather it is reducing profits.

Using an outside finance source for a $10,000 procedure nets them $9,000. Performing three of these procedures costs the dentist $3,000 in discount fees, while netting them $27,000 in cash.

Compare that to the dentist extending his own credit and charging interest over the term of the payment plan. Patient payments over 60 months with 18 percent interest would equal $15,236. Two patients would equal $30,742, which is actually more than the dentist receives from the outside financing company for three patients. If all three patients pay off their payment plans, the dentist would receive $45,708, which is $18,708 more than he would receive from the outside finance company. If the dentist averages three procedures a month, he/she would generate approximately $225,000 in additional income compared to the 28 percent reduction in profit by using an outside finance company.

Outstanding Receivable Balances
In certain situations, extending payment terms to an outstanding receivable account often is a more effective and less expensive option than sending the account to outside collections. This is called "soft collections."

In today's economy, many people want to pay their bill, but often lack the resources to make a single large payment. Affordable monthly payments are an attractive option for these people. If sent to outside collections, the agency generally suggests a payment plan as a first option in the collections process. For this, the business pays a 25 to 35 percent collections’ fee on what is collected. If the business extends its own payment terms, it saves the collections’ fee, while still receiving payments.

For example, assuming 10 accounts each with $3,000 balances due were sent to an outside collections agency. At best the company would net between $19,500 and $22,500 of the total $30,000 outstanding. Adding to the cost, often collections agencies only collect on 40 percent of the accounts worked, which further reduces the business’s net to $7,800 to $9,000 of the $30,000 outstanding. This translates into $0.26 to $0.30 cents on the dollar being paid to the business.

Compare that to extending your own credit based on terms that your customer can afford. You have two options for approaching this opportunity: 1) run credit checks on the account owner prior to extending terms; 2) extend the same terms to everyone without credit checks. If you run credit checks on accounts prior to extending terms, the terms offered can vary based on credit risk. This would include term and interest rate charged. If the situation doesn't warrant this approach, extending terms that cover the perceived risk for the entire pool of accounts may be a simpler and better way to go.

Using our example, assume that standard terms are used that offer a 6-month term and 18 percent interest rate. If everyone pays, the business receives the full $30,000 due plus $1,595 in interest income. Comparing this to the outside collections option, the payments received from just 3 out of the 10 accounts is more than what would be received from the collections’ agency. That provides a 70 percent upside to the business that extends its own credit terms. Further, if the accounts do default, the business can still send those accounts to an outside collections agency.

Effective Automation is the Key
While extending your own credit for leveraged services and receivable balances offer enticing advantages over outside financing or collections services, trying to manage the process manually can substantially increase risk and place a large burden on existing staff. Using a software solution that automates the entire process lifecycle delivers significant benefits.

Effective automation not only eliminates error-prone manual processes it can enforce lending best practices and significantly reduce the workload for existing staff. A robust, easy-to-use system provides a rich set of capabilities to maximize results even for a small business with limited staff.

In our next blog post for "Establishing Best Practices for Extending Credit in Today's Economy," we will more fully explore best practices for deciding what types of customers are eligible for credit.

I was reading an interesting article in Smart Money titled, "The $20,000 Pet" today. As quoted in the article, a report by market-research company Packaged Facts stated that Americans spent $20 billion on veterinary bills in 2010 — an 8.5% increase from a year earlier and more than double the amount spent just a decade ago. It went on to say that pet owners often don't argue when a vet recommends treatment for a beloved pet. Stating that a recent survey by the Associated Press and Petside.com found that 35% of pet owners said they were very likely to pick up $2,000 in vet costs to treat a sick dog or cat, while 22% said they'd pick up $5,000 in vet costs. Much of that money is being spent on new medical technology.

The article goes on to point out that pet insurance is benefiting from this trend and becoming more popular with pet owners which is driving up premiums more than 20% annually. Still, pet insurance is used by a small percentage of pet owners and the benefits offered are limited in many cases. So all this begs the question, "how do pet owners afford these new high cost services?" Conversely, "what should veterinary practices do to promote these high tech procedures and attract these more valuable customers?"

Pet care financing is the solution. Veterinary practices and Animal Hospitals that are on the leading edge of offering these procedures based on new medical technology understand the need to offer financing to their customers.

This is the second in our series, "Establishing Best Practices for Extending Credit in Today's Economy".

According to a 2008 survey conducted by GfK Roper Public Affairs and Media, when faced with a medical expense over $1,000, one out of 10 people surveyed stated that they would seek a payment plan/monthly payments from the service provider to help in paying the expense. This was before the impact of the credit crisis was really felt by the general population.

Today, one can assume, if asked the same question again, that a higher percentage of people would seek payment assistance in the form of a payment plan. If your business recognizes the need to extend credit terms to your customers, you probably also realize that it would be a good idea to have a plan in order to execute successfully and avoid unnecessary repayment risk.

There are several areas to consider when getting organized to extend credit. In this blog post, we will highlight "best practices" to assist you in successfully extending credit to your customers.

Develop a Written Plan

A plan defines the goal behind offering credit terms, a roadmap for everyone to follow in executing the plan, as well as the metrics to measure its success. Putting it down on paper forces you to really think about what is involved, offers you the ability to get valuable feedback before implementing, and the ability to share it with everyone on your team. This ensure that it is properly executed.

Understand Lending and Privacy Compliance Requirements

Extending credit terms is lending and is, therefore, subject to a number of state and federal consumer lending and privacy laws and regulations. It is a best practice to seek out professional advice to understand your role and obligation regarding these laws and regulations. Topics to cover include collecting and handling personal information from applicants, making credit decisions, using a credit agreement, collecting payments, handling missed payments, and use of outside collections services.

There is a lifecycle to extending credit with many steps along the way. Minimizing risk associated with compliance, while at the same time ensuring a positive experience for your customers, requires some planning across the entire lifecycle. Automation across the entire lifecycle can greatly simplify compliance and dramatically reduce the overall risks involved extending credit successfully.

Formalize Credit Processes

Formalizing the various processes involved in extending credit aids in compliance, ensures that credit criteria are applied consistently for all applicants, and creates written documentation needed to process and enforce the credit agreement with the borrower. Specific areas to consider include the application process, the credit application and credit agreement forms, borrower communications, document retention and record storage polices, credit evaluation and approval, missed payment policies, and default resolution. Automation and written guidelines for staff to follow are best practices to achieve these objectives.

Effective Automation is the Key

When you hear or read stories about businesses that have had negative experiences with extending credit to their customers, it is often because they weren't organized and didn't apply best practices to the overall process. Unfortunately, even in cases where good procedures and policies are defined, execution using manual processes often proves time-consuming and error-prone. When staff turnover is factored into the equation consistently, applying best practices to extending credit becomes more difficult.

Effective automation of the ENTIRE lifecycle is the key to success. Supported by written policies and procedures it greatly reduces risk by simplifying compliance, enforcing best practices, eliminating manual processes, enforcing consistency, and providing business intelligence at every stage of the lifecycle and across all credit accounts. Effective automation makes it possible for even small businesses with limited staff to be highly successful extending credit to their customers.

In our next blog post for "Establishing Best Practices for Extending Credit in Today's Economy," we will explore best practices for creating new payment plans in more detail.

This is the first in our series, "Establishing Best Practices for Extending Credit in Today's Economy".

Successful businesses in elective healthcare, dental care, and veterinary services use customer financing to maintain and grow their sales. Like accepting different forms of payment, such as credit cards, extending credit is becoming more popular as another method to help close a sale, while enabling customers to financially secure services they would otherwise not be able to afford.

Unfortunately, given the current tighter credit standards and the increase in consumers with FICO scores under 650, access to consumer financing has become significantly limited making the financing that is available more expensive for these businesses. For example, approval rates for traditional financing through credit cards or lending institutions have seen a significant double-digit decline causing many consumers to forego non-essential elective healthcare services and creating a significant revenue decline for elective healthcare providers.

The credit crisis has also impacted many other B2C industries, such as education, legal, home improvement, luxury goods & services, and others that suffer from the lack of effective third party financing.

DIY - extend your own credit
The choice for many businesses is between offering their own payment terms or doing nothing, forgoing the much-needed revenue and crossing their fingers that the economy will improve soon.

As a result, many businesses are now turning to extending credit via internally funded payment plans as a way to close the gap and create a "win-win" for their business and their customers.

Extending credit through payment plans is hardly a new concept. For many types of businesses this is an accepted and well-understood practice that has helped them grow their sales and maintain customer loyalty. And, importantly, steady cash flow.

Many businesses that are considering a program to extend credit through offering their own payment plans have little experience in setting it up. Others, that already offer credit through payment plans struggle with manual processes that are time consuming and error-prone. For both, we recommend establishing credit practices using a "best practices" approach.

Establish a purpose for extending credit
Credit terms enable customers to focus less on prices, enhance customer relations, and have the potential to generate new sales. But before jumping in, the question needs to be asked: "Is it necessary to extend credit to maintain or increase sales?" Answering this question helps to define the purpose for an effective credit program and can establish milestones for measuring the program's success.

Extending credit is an effective way to close the financing gap and give you more control. This is especially true if approval rates have dropped or discount fees have increased from your existing third-party lender.
The same is true if your competition offers customer financing and you don’t. The availability of customer financing is an important buying criteria for many consumers, particularly for larger ticket services, and especially in today's economic climate.

Assuming the answer is "yes" for your business, you need a plan for how to extend credit effectively and efficiently. "Getting organized to extend credit," which is our next post in the blog series "Establishing Best Practices for Extending Credit in Today's Economy" will help to get you on the path to success with extending credit to your customers.
  

According to a blog post on Mint.com today by John Ulzheimer, President of Consumer Education of Credit.com and the author of the book “You’re Nothing But A Number", over 35% of the population in the United States now has a FICO score below 650. As stated in the post, that 650 score break is meaningful because in today’s financial services environment many lenders and insurance companies consider the +/- 650 point to be the dividing line between prime and sub-prime. What this means is more consumers are going to be denied or adversely approved (that means you’re approved for a loan, but with punishing rates or terms), and scores that are trending lower will continue to do so for many years to come.

This reinforces the fact that the market for consumer financing is very challenging and looks to remain that way for years to come. Approval rates for conventional customer financing look to remain very low and terms for those lucky enough to qualify will be expensive. What we have seen is a gradual increase in the number of subprime lenders coming into the consumer financing market to fill part of the gap being left by conventional lenders. Unfortunately, even with these two sources of external financing approval rates are still well below 50% and terms are expensive for the borrower.

ExtendCredit.com works with many conventional and subprime lenders because we complement their lending programs. For their business customers, ExtendCredit.com solves the problem of low approval rates by enabling these businesses to offer their own internally funded payment plans. Because ExtendCredit.com automates lending best practices and offers the business instant credit and fraud verification, repayment risk can be minimized while generating needed sales for the business.

In upcoming blog posts we will be doing a series on Best Practices for Extending Credit to Your Customers. In this series we will explore each best practice that a business should implement to be successful and explain how ExtendCredit.com automates many of the best practices for the business. We hope you will tune in for this informative and valuable series.

To see the original blog post on mint.com, click here.
  

The credit crisis has severely impacted many industries who rely on customer financing to drive their business and help their customers afford their services.

The Animal and Pet Care Industry is one of the industries impacted by the lack of adequate client financing. Pet insurance and conventional third-party financing are not meeting the need today. ExtendCredit.com is filling this void through it's Pet Care Payment Plan program for Veterinarians and Animal Hospitals.

To learn more, read our press release, or watch our video on YouTube.

Businesses across the United States are looking for alternatives for customer financing. Conventional financing programs are not meeting the need. Approval rates are at an all time low as only the most credit-worthy customers qualify for conventional financing. Fewer and fewer services even qualify for conventional financing. All too often, when conventional financing is available, you hear stories about customer complaints that it is really expensive. These are signs of the times. The economic crisis is still with us and the situation will not change any time soon. The harsh reality for businesses that use conventional customer financing is that business and revenues are significantly lower than in the past. So how do you close this gap and build your business and revenues back up in these challenging economic times?

Extend your own credit in the form of payment plans to your customers as a complement to conventional financing. This approach provides choices for you and your customers. If conventional financing programs are only approving 15% of customers that apply for financing, then offering your own payment plans can close that gap and increase approvals to more normal levels. If conventional financing programs will not cover certain procedures or types of transactions, then offering your own payment plans can generate sales that would otherwise be lost.

As a business owner, you see the benefit of offering your own payment plans, but you do not have the infrastructure, resources or experience to manage them. You may have even tried offering your own payment plans in the past and struggled with juggling spreadsheets and the time consuming and error-prone manual processes involved with this approach. This is where ExtendCredit.com comes into the picture.

ExtendCredit.com provides businesses with a comprehensive, easy-to-use online service that enables them to offer their own flexible, extended payment terms to qualified customers as well as easily manage those payment plans. ExtendCredit.com provides everything needed to initiate, manage, and collect on those payment plans. The fees are extremely affordable for the business and there are no long term contracts required to participate.

ExtendCredit.com is helping businesses across the United States in a variety of industries, including Healthcare practices such as Orthodontics, Cosmetic Dentistry, Cosmetic Surgery, Weight Loss, Eye Surgery, Denturists, Vein Care, Hair Restoration, Fertility and others, Veterinary Practices, Service businesses such as Automotive Repair, Home Improvement, Family Law, and other small businesses that see the value offering payment plans hold for growing their businesses in these challenging economic times.

We recently exhibited at the Pacific Northwest Dental Conference in Seattle. While we were a little last minute in deciding to exhibit, the show was a great success for ExtendCredit.com. Throughout the show, we had more booth traffic than our hard working team could handle. A lot of follow up appointments with dentists, medical billers, and potential resellers will keep our local sales team in the Seattle area hopping for some time to come.

Using payment plans for managing accounts receivable was the hot topic. In today's credit challenged economy, more and more patients are struggling to pay their bills. All too often, medical bills get pushed to the bottom of the pile. Accounts receivable balances at dental practices are getting larger and aging longer.

Offering payment plan options to many of these patients with outstanding balances is good business. With ExtendCredit.com, the dental practice decides which accounts qualify for payment plans and how the payment plans should work. The dental practice controls whether credit checks are performed, and what interest rate and payment term to set.

ExtendCredit works with the dental practice to design a "best practices" approach to communicate the offer to the patients and get them signed up. Once signed up, ExtendCredit's automated system takes over for collecting payments from the patients and handling any missed payment situations. The dental practice has real-time access to patient payment activity to stay on top of weekly cash flow from the payment plans. Using ExtendCredit.com, offering payment plans as a cash flow strategy for existing accounts receivable is simple, highly automated, and effective.

To learn more about how ExtendCredit.com can help you manage your accounts receivable better call us today at 888-364-2808, or email us at sales@extendcredit.com. You'll be glad you did!

If you are planning on attending PNDC in Seattle this week, make sure to stop by our booth (# 215) to say hi and learn more about the great services ExtendCredit.com offers Dentists and Medical Billers.

Sponsored by the Washington State Dental Association (WSDA), the Pacific Northwest Dental Conference (PNDC) offers two days of continuing dental education with over 50 nationally-renowned speakers and a dental trade show of more than 350 exhibits. With almost 9,000 attendees, the PNDC is the largest gathering of dental professionals in Washington.

Contact sales@extendcredit.com to arrange a time to meet while at the show or to learn more about ExtendCredit.com.