Bakker International
New way of working led to increased collection rates and improved cashflow
Bakker International is one of Europe’s largest e-commerce players in gardening products, known for quality products and high delivery standards. For the past 70 years, they have helped customers from across Europe on their journey towards their dream garden by selling gardening products on a “payment after delivery” model.
Wytse Scholten, Financial Controller at Bakker International explains:
“Due to the nature of our business and our business model, we have a huge number of individual debtors with smaller claims. We were struggling to collect all of these, due to a lack of time and resources to follow up on all overdue invoices. This resulted in a relatively high amount of debts that we failed to collect, which, in some cases, we were forced to write off or create a provision for.”
Solution
Together with Bakker, we created a new, uniform approach to follow up on their overdue receivables in 5 of their markets: Germany, The Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, and Belgium.
“Alektum offered to follow up on overdue invoices for us through multiple contact channels, using their time, resources and partners to increase the collection rate. They also helped us in other ways, like offering to play a role in credit checks before accepting orders from clients, as well as assisting in possible legal action if all other actions had failed.”
“Working with Alektum has resulted in a higher collection rate and thus improved cashflow. It also means that we need fewer people on our payroll working on the collection of overdue debts, which has lowered cost on our end. Also, the fact that Alektum can provide their services at a very attractive price structure is, of course, also very positive for our P&L”
“We had worked with Alektum on a smaller scale prior to this and had positive experiences with them. When we decided to outsource all of the activities concerning overdue invoices, we invited 4 parties to pitch and Alektum made the best impression. They were able to adapt to our processes fast, making sure we create a way of working together which works for both parties. That, combined with higher collection rates and the committed assistance of Alektum’s account managers and other team members has made it a very successful collaboration so far.” Says Wytse Scholten, Financial Controller at Bakker International.