Capital is the blood of an enterprise. Without blood, enterprises will be "malnourished" or "dying" and may die at any time. In reality, many enterprises go bankrupt because of poor capital turnover. Therefore, how to strengthen the management of accounts receivable has become the key to the survival and development of enterprises.
First, the problems in the management of accounts receivable:
When auditing some enterprises, we found that the management of accounts receivable is very chaotic and the internal control is quite weak, mainly in the following aspects:
1, the enterprise did not set up the correct management target of accounts receivable, and pursued profit maximization unilaterally, ignoring the cash flow of the enterprise. One of the most important reasons is that the assessment of business leaders puts too much emphasis on profit indicators, but does not set such indicators as "the recovery rate of accounts receivable".
2. There is no department responsible for accounts receivable management. Many enterprises have a large number of accounts receivable that cannot be reconciled and collected. One of the main reasons is that there is no clear department to manage accounts receivable, no corresponding management measures are established, and there is no necessary internal control, which leads to the inability to investigate the responsibility for the loss of accounts receivable.
3. The accounting supervision of accounts receivable is quite weak.
Accounts receivable subsidiary ledger management system has not been established, and accounts receivable have not been assisted or managed only by age. Many enterprises simply classify the amount of accounts receivable according to the age in the supplementary information of the balance sheet, which usually does not assist the management of accounts receivable. In the case of good enterprise salary, it can basically meet the needs, but in the case of poor enterprise salary, it can not meet the needs of management.
There is no regular inventory system for accounts receivable, and accounts are not settled for a long time. Due to the difference in time and space between the flow of goods and funds in the transaction process, and the possible mistakes in the delivery and recording of bills, the rights and obligations of both parties can be clarified by regularly checking the outstanding matters in the economic exchanges between creditors and debtors. But in reality, some enterprises do not pay their accounts for a long time, and even if they do, they have not formed a legal and effective reconciliation basis. They just made verbal promises and didn't play their due role.
Bad debt write-off management system has not been established. Some enterprises have long-term uncollected accounts receivable, the age of which is even as high as 10 years, and this part of assets has long been unrecoverable.
4. The enterprise fails to carry out credit management on accounts receivable according to the degree of risk. At present, most enterprises have not assessed the risk of accounts receivable, nor have they established a perfect credit system, so they don't know whether overdue accounts receivable can be recovered and how much. In view of the above problems, the author puts forward his own countermeasures: to strengthen and improve the management of accounts receivable, we must first solve the target problem. Profit maximization is not the goal of accounts receivable management. If the goal is to maximize profits, it may lead to neglect of risks and sacrifice the long-term interests of enterprises. The general goal of accounts receivable management should establish the concept of maximizing enterprise value, and good capital turnover should not be ignored.
First, it is necessary to reasonably balance accounts receivable in advance and implement planned management of accounts receivable.
In the annual plan of each year, the year-end balance of accounts receivable should be made clear, and a relatively positive average collection period should be set, allowing the average collection period of each year to fluctuate up and down this index, as the basis for assessing performance, setting the proportion of accounts receivable to total current assets, implementing flexible control, and tightening the scale of credit sales when products are selling well; When the product is weak, be lenient; Be strict when money is tight. When the scale of credit reduction is close to the warning line, we should resolutely take measures to suspend credit business.
Second, it is necessary to implement the responsibility management of accounts receivable, so that everyone is responsible for every account receivable.
Establish an examination and approval system for credit sales. Take measures from the source to avoid losses, implement the principle of "whoever approves is responsible", and each account receivable business has a clear responsible person, so as to facilitate the timely recovery of accounts receivable and reduce the loss of bad debts. Of course, enterprises can facilitate management according to their own characteristics and give different levels of personnel different amounts of approval authority. All managers can only apply for approval within their authority. If the amount exceeds the limit, they must ask the superior leader for approval. If the amount is particularly huge, they need to report to the top leaders of the enterprise for approval. At the same time, the responsibility system must be implemented, and all managers should be responsible for their own business, and be linked with their economic interests, requiring them to post supervision every business they handle until they recover their funds.
Establish sales responsibility system, introduce incentive mechanism and implement reward and punishment measures. Enterprises can take the loan recovery as the main basis for evaluating the performance of sales departments and sales personnel, and establish an index evaluation system, including total sales revenue, loan recovery rate, accounts receivable turnover rate, etc. And according to the actual recovery situation, it is linked to the salary of the debtor.
Third, implement scientific contract management and protect your legitimate rights and interests by law!
Except cash receipts, all supply businesses should sign contracts, and the main supply businesses should use a unified contract text. The contract elements should be complete and specific, especially the collection period and the specific liability for breach of contract for delayed payment. Only in this way can we use legal weapons to ensure that our own interests are not infringed as much as possible.
Fourth, evaluate customer credit and determine the scale of credit sales.
Conduct in-depth on-the-spot investigation on the assets, financial status, business ability, past business records, corporate reputation, etc. of customers who intend to sell on credit, evaluate their credit rating according to the investigation results, and establish credit rating files of customers who sell on credit. Your company is a large-scale and reputable enterprise in the past business dealings; Qualified customers are customers with average assets and financial status, standardized financial system, certain assets as collateral, and able to settle the payment after being urged to do business in the past; Poor assets and financial status, chaotic financial system, no assets mortgage, no business dealings in the past or customers with poor reputation. The credit rating of credit customers should be evaluated once a year, and can be adjusted at any time under special circumstances.
According to the repayment ability and credit rating of credit customers, determine the sales policy. For customers with poor credit standing, cash transactions are adopted, for customers with average or good credit standing, acceptance bills are adopted when cash is not accepted, and for customers with good credit standing, installment payment is adopted, but the term and accumulated amount should be specified.
Fifth, give play to the Christian function of accounting and help recover accounts receivable.
The financial department of an enterprise should establish a detailed account of accounts receivable according to the customer area of credit sales, make timely accounting of credit sales business, regularly count the amount, age and changes of accounts receivable of each customer, and feed back to the competent leaders and sales departments of the enterprise in time, so as to provide reliable basis for evaluating and adjusting the credit rating of credit sales customers and understand the general situation of credit sales.
The accounting department of an enterprise shall regularly send statements and reminders to customers who sell on credit. For customers with overdue credit sales, it is mainly to obtain the statement confirmed and signed by the supply and marketing and accounting managers of both parties as the original basis for reconciliation between the two parties; For customers with overdue credit sales, at the same time as issuing the statement, they need to issue a reminder notice to collect the arrears in time. Enterprise supply and marketing departments and relevant management personnel should actively cooperate with the accounting department to do this work.
Sixth, implement the active collection policy and risk transfer mechanism.
For customers who have not settled their debts on credit within the time limit, enterprises should organize forces to urge distributors to step up the collection, especially for some customers who have poor reputation, long arrears and large amounts of money, and need a special person to honor the rewards and punishments for credit sales personnel. The supply and marketing department of the enterprise shall organize personnel to actively contact and recover the arrears in time. For customers who can't repay on credit in the near future, they should ask the other party to make a repayment plan and provide a guarantee to repay their debts step by step. Those who fail to make repayment plans and provide guarantees, or find themselves lacking in solvency, should be resolved through legal channels in time.
Risk transfer for some irrecoverable accounts: firstly, the liquidity of assets can be transferred, that is, accounts receivable can be transformed into more liquid assets. Because bills are written documents, which have stronger creditor's rights than accounts receivable, bills can be discounted to banks or transferred by endorsement before maturity, which is more liquid. When the enterprise can't recover the accounts in time, it can consider converting them into notes receivable to prevent the loss of bad debts to some extent. Third, the object of transfer, with part or all of its accounts receivable as collateral, borrows money from financial institutions within a specified period of time, or sells all accounts receivable to financial institutions, so that enterprises can transfer some or all of the risks existing in the recovery of accounts receivable to financial institutions. At present, this practice has been implemented in some western countries. Finally, you can change direction. When it is found that the accounts receivable are difficult to recover, the enterprise can be flexible and buy back the assets it needs from customers to offset this part of the accounts receivable, that is, the enterprise can regard this part of the accounts receivable as the money paid in advance to customers to purchase assets, thus realizing the transfer of accounts receivable.