Adopting a professional, personal and ‘client-friendly’ approach to invoicing and payment collection is an intrinsic part of a company’s survival. Without it, staff cannot get paid and the costs associated with the day-to-day running of a business cannot be met.

But, I struggle to think of any company that advertises how well it manages this function.

This is not a subject for polite conversation. It is meant to happen quietly in the background and, hopefully, everyone does as is expected and invoices are paid when they should be.

Nicky is our Credit Controller and Accounts Administrator. Her prior career extended to being responsible for Letters of Credit, Production Management, Sales Accounting and Shipping.

Now, she is responsible for liaising with our Linguists regarding their payments as well as keeping our accounting ledgers clean. This is, of course, a euphemism for making sure that our invoices are delivered and paid on-time. And, yes, on occasion, she gently reminds some of our clients to pay their outstanding bills in accordance with our agreed payment terms.

So, what motivates Nicky? I wondered how it is possible to enjoy “accounting”, combined with the added task of sending those reminders.

The reason became clear. Not because she is Dutch, (although she admits that the national trait of “straight-talking” is an asset), but because she takes pride in making sure that what is supposed to happen actually does happen.

For each client, Nicky creates an invoice that is designed to meet his or her business need.

For each linguist, she prepares a job statement which summarises the work performed in any one month. This may seem topsy-turvy, but it has two major advantages. Firstly, linguists are released from the administrative chore of creating an invoice and, secondly, because we have prepared the statement for acceptance by the Linguist, payment can occur promptly.

In summary, Nicky treats each person as an individual and in doing so, strengthens the commitment of clients and linguists alike in retaining eTeams as their preferred language partner.

“eTeams – translations you can trust”