5 Ways to Manage Customer Risk with Tryton

5 Ways to Manage Customer Risk with Tryton

If you automate the monitoring of your company’s financial risk, you improve its financial position, sleep more soundly, and can devote your time to new tasks that increase value for your customers.

Take a look at 5 ways Tryton can help you do this.

Make sure customers do not owe you more than you want them to

With Tryton, the account_credit_limit + sale_credit_limit modules allow you to specify an amount in euros as the maximum amount you want customers to owe you at any given time.

If a user tries to make a sale that would exceed this amount, they will be shown a warning. Through permissions, you can then decide whether the user can override the warning or not. This means the sales manager can approve special orders while the rest of the team cannot do so.

By default, Tryton calculates this risk based on invoices already issued, using the total invoice amount (including VAT), and on the order’s net amount when no invoice yet exists (as VAT has not yet become due).

However, thanks to the sale_credit_limit_total module that we created for one of our customers, it is also possible to use the amount including VAT from the moment the order is placed.

Make sure customers do not owe you more than the limit permitted by credit insurance

If you use credit insurance such as Crédito y Caución, you can add the risk limit permitted by the insurer to your limit. With the account_insurance_credit_limit module, which we also developed at NaN-tic, you can keep a detailed record of the evolution of the risk granted by the insurance company to each of your customers.

You can also monitor expiry dates and the maximum risk assumed throughout the year.

For example, you may have requested a limit of €30,000 for a customer who, in theory, seemed likely to purchase for those amounts. But after a year, our tool can show you graphically that the maximum risk was €5,000 and that it was €3,000 most of the time.

You can use this information to request a renewal of €6,000 and thus reduce insurance costs.

Do not deliver goods if there are overdue payments

One thing is the maximum risk you are prepared to assume—let’s say €6,000—and another, very different thing is that they “only” owe you €4,000 but should have paid you 30 days ago.

If we only monitored risk, the system would allow you to continue placing orders for this customer…

Fortunately, Tryton also covers this situation thanks to overdue-payment management modules such as account_dunning and account_dunning_fee.

Thanks to these modules, you can establish rule systems to follow up on overdue payments. For example, you may decide to follow up more aggressively with certain customers and more flexibly with others.

In each case, you can decide how often to follow up (for example, 3 days after the payment becomes overdue, then after 5 days, then 7, etc.) and you can also configure after which reminder you want to block the acceptance of new orders for the customer.

This way, you can decide that you still accept a new order at the first reminder, only 3 days after the payment becomes overdue, but not after 7 days have passed since the payment became overdue.

Issue the invoice and collect payment before sending the goods

Another option is simply to work with prepayment.

Tryton allows you to decide which workflow to follow when creating a new order, so you can choose to issue the invoice first. The delivery note to dispatch the goods will then be created automatically only once it has been paid.

The lowest possible risk is not taking on any risk in the first place.

Incidentally, Tryton lets you manage orders this way for customers who owe you money without needing approval from a manager.

Use advance-payment deposits

An alternative to collecting the invoice first is to collect a deposit from the customer, which you can understand as an earnest payment or a payment on account. Thanks to the account_deposit module, Tryton helps you account for this amount correctly and deduct the payment on account when you issue the final invoice.

Best regards!