With South African consumer and commercial bad debt judgments running at more than R5-billion last year and an average of 15 companies going insolvent each working day, the need for a quick, efficient and confidential means of running credit checks has never been greater.
"The Internet has opened up opportunities to take a wide range of financial services to the desktop and with huge sums of money being lost daily to bad debts, credit control is an area where financial and accounting software can add immense value," says Stephen Corrigan, managing director of accounting and payroll software developer Pastel Software SA, a company in the JSE-listed Softline Limited Group.
Pastel has now brought a comprehensive, proactive credit control assessment program to the desktop. Known as Pastel CreditPartner, the program interfaces directly to the Pastel Partner V5.2 and Pastel Accounting SOHO V2 accounting software packages, both widely used in the SME sector.
Pastel CreditPartner, developed as a joint venture with Octagon, Kreditinform's technology partner, is an add-on module to Pastel accounting software packages that gives users direct access to some 200 000 Kreditinform company and individual credit reports, five years of judgment history and the Kreditinform rating for the company.
"A host of other detailed credit information is available at the tap of a key, including bank credit coding, banking history, status of the conduct of the account and records of RD cheques. The user is, therefore, able to obtain very quickly, in the privacy of his own office, sufficient information to make a highly accurate assessment of the creditworthiness of the company or individual," says Corrigan
A "drill down" feature gives the history of a company and identifies company structures, including directors, subsidiaries and other registered names. Access to KISS - the Kreditinform Information Sharing System - allows users to see the payment profile of a customer, indicating whether the customer's average period for completing payment is 30 days, 120 days or more. Graphic displays also reveal average monthly debt exposures for the company being researched.
Corrigan says the Pastel CreditPartner package takes all of the guesswork out of credit control and gives companies peace of mind.
Pastel CreditPartner operates exclusively with Pastel accounting software and will retail at R400 excluding VAT. Users also pay a monthly charge of R95 excluding VAT for the connection to the SPOC (secure point of contact) gateway that draws all of the information from the various sources where it is held at a charge ranging from as little as R12.50 excluding VAT depending upon the complexity of the report. There are plans to add features such as debt collection to the software during the course of the year.
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