Introduction To Receivable Management
Receivables, also termed as trade credit or debtors are component of current assets. When a firm sells its product in credit, account receivables are created.
Account receivable are the money receivable in some future date for the credit sale of goods and services at present. These days, most business transactions are in credit. Most companies, when they face competition, use credit sales as an important tool for sales promotion. As a sales promotion tool, credit sale enhances firm's sales revenue and ultimately pushes up the profitability. But after the credit sale has been made, the actual collection of cash may be delayed for months. As these late payments stretch out over time, they may cause substantial drop in a company's profit margin. Since the extension of credit involves both cost and benefits, the firm's manager must be able to measure them to determine the ultimate effect of credits sales. In this prospective, we define the receivable management as the aspect of a firm's current assets management, which is concerned with determining optimum credit policy associated to a firm, such that the benefit from extension of credit is greater than the cost of maintaining investment in accounts receivables.
Significance And Purpose Of Receivable Management
The basic purpose of firm's receivable management is to determine effective credit policy that increases the efficiency of firm's credit and collection department and contributes to the maximization of value of the firm. The specific purposes of receivable management are as follows:
1. To evaluate the creditworthiness of customers before granting or extending the credit.
2. To minimize the cost of investment in receivables.
3. To minimize the possible bad debt losses.
4. To formulate the credit terms in such a way that results into maximization of sales revenue and still maintaining minimum investment in receivables.
5. To minimize the cost of running credit and collection department.
6. To maintain a trade off between costs and benefits associated to credit policy.
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