Do you provide goods or services on credit to corporate customers? Do not miss this tip

Have you made a supply on credit, but would not have done so had you discovered some additional information about your customer before you made the supply? Or would you like to avoid being in this situation in the first place?

If you answered yes to either of these questions on, here is one very simple and effective suggestion that will not cost you anything to implement.

Information stored by ASIC on your corporate customers

If your customer is a company, a wealth of information about your customer will be available on the public company database maintained by ASIC. This database includes information about many of the significant events that company will experience in its lifetime. This information is stored in the form of “ASIC documents” which are lodged against a company and then made publicly available.

How can I use ASIC information to protect my business?

You can sign up for free basic access to the information kept by ASIC. You do this by visiting ASIC’s company alert page and activating automatic notifications in relation to all corporate customers that you wish to monitor.

After you set up a ASIC company alert, you will be automatically notified by email when an ASIC document is lodged against one of your corporate customers. These automatic notifications could alert you to important events such as:

• Your customer deregistering its business
• An administrator or liquidator being appointed to your customer
• Your customer selling its business to a third party

So how do ASIC company alerts help me?

Take the first example above. Imagine a customer has just deregistered its company, and then next day it places an order with you for $10,000 of goods on credit. if you are not aware of the deregistration, you might deliver the goods unknowingly. If the customer then fails to pay for some or all of the goods, you would be left with the expensive and uncertain task of trying to recover a debt from a deregistered company.

Had you set up an ASIC company alert, you would have been automatically informed of the deregistration before your customer placed an order. And you may well have saved your business thousands of dollars.

For a FREE 20 MINUTE TUTORIAL on how to implement ASIC company alerts, please call us on 03 8683 5645 or send an email request to [email protected]