Commercial Collections: Fixture of New B2B Culture

If you’re in business-to-business field, or even if you’re a consumer products business that works through third-party distribution channels, you probably know what it’s like to check your mail anxiously each day, sifting through all bills for that payment that was supposed to have been in months ago.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. If you were a good, honest businessperson who dealt with other good, honest businesspeople, “commercial collections” wasn’t supposed to be part of your vocabulary.

Back in good old days, an invoice or purchase order that had an established company listed in “bill to” field was almost as good as a cashier’s check. Nowadays, if you’re in business of serving other businesses you may find that your cash flow is less reliable than a small-time bookie’s.

Commercial Collections: A Personal Story

This past April I finally got $2,000 a client owed me for work done in December, after spending almost as much money’s worth of my time reminding them to pay.

No, this wasn’t one of those hand-shake deals—we had a 5-page contract specifying net-30 payment terms. Nor was this some guy with a lemonade stand. It was media division of one of largest retailers in United States.

The worst part was, I trusted this client based on my experience working with them a few years before. I actually spent money on Christmas presents, fully expecting payment to come in before my credit card statement.

Avoiding Outstanding Invoices

Now you know how it works, why is it so important? For one, many feed readers and browsers already auto discover RSS feeds. But perhaps what's more important, Microsoft is incorporating this starting with Internet Explorer 7. Internet Explorer still commands a good chunk of browser share out there, especially those who are new to Internet or non technical Internet users. If your RSS feeds cannot be auto discovered, it's a good chance you'll lose out on a bunch of subscribers.

As it is today, browsers like Firefox, Opera and Safari can auto discover feeds. Many use this to subscribe because it's just so much easier. While this group may not be that large but why should you not take advantage? If just making your feeds auto discovery friendly you get an extra subscriber, even if it's only one it would be worth it because it costs nothing but maybe 2 minutes of your time.

So how do you find out if your feeds are auto discovery friendly? The good news is, if you're using a blog to manage your content, many have this feature built in. But it doesn't hurt to just check it anyway. If you don't use a blog, chances are, your feed is not auto discovery enabled. So here's how you'd add or check it.