Account Management.

My next tip follows on from my second post, it's extremely easy to fall into a routine of just ordering goods without questioning price especially when you have a credit account.

When your in this routine your losing money, you may question this tip because of the time you think you will need to spend managing your prices but it doesn't need to be this way, it only needs doing once a year and when its done it's very easy to manage and your suppliers will have no excuses.

Once again you will need to ask for a print out of all your pricing terms that are attached to your account, once you have these please take the time to go through them, it is in your best interests.

Now as far as i know you have your invoices sent through by post or you have them sent by e-mail (e-mail is a lot easier to manage) take the time to check your items on a daily basis, if you don't have the time then do it weekly but please please please do check them, i have come across big spending accounts that other salesmen have managed and with a helpful tool with the system i use i can check what items the account has bought.

A particular customer built 3 new build houses from the ground up and the list of goods was substantial but when i went through that list of goods the variances on price was shocking worse still......the customer wasn't even aware, the salesmen in question was a manager and when i flagged this up he told me to keep it quiet as if i did bring this to light the credits we would have to do would amount to thousands over a stretch of eight months, now I'm not saying merchants and companies are devious or out to trip you up far from it, it's in there best interests also as when your account is better managed it means less work for everyone and we all know time is money in the construction industry.

so to summarise this post please do the following:-

a) Get your terms set up and ask for a hard copy yourself.

b) Check your invoices.

This maybe telling you how to suck eggs but so many customers don't do this or feel they have done it in the past and don't need to do it again but let me remind you come January of any year there are price increases and 2 of the the four companies i work for have a system that deletes the pricing term that was set the previous year, the reason? if your set on a very very competitive rate on timber and there's a price increase of between 5-15% it means that the company selling it loses money holding the price so the system deletes the term, if your dealing with a very helpful member of staff they will inform you of this and reset the term, that brings me to a question......how many of you have had a call giving you the information of a price increase and that your terms are being reset?