Selling products and services overseas can open up new opportunities but also has considerable risks, in particular the risk of late payment or non-payment of invoices. Language barriers, cultural differences, local customs, and even differences in legislation can make collection of cross-border invoices difficult for your credit control department.

Small and medium sized businesses rarely have the ability to employ and retain multilingual credit controllers who have expertise in each overseas market, and even large corporates can struggle to maintain a skilled multilingual credit control team. Engaging a specialist agency to chase payment on your behalf gives you access to expertise in a cost effective and flexible manner, minimises risk, and allows more focus on core business.

Multilingual credit control

Sterling Outsourcing is an international outsourcing business focussed primarily on order to cash process. We provide multilingual international credit control service from our dedicated service centre in Krakow, Poland.

Our core services include European credit control, international credit control, international debt recovery and international litigation. Additional outsourced services include international accounts payable, bank reconciliation, and other areas of accounts and finance outsourcing.

Flexibility of service

Sterling employs over 50 well trained staff, many of whom are multilingual. We take a flexible approach in assigning staff to clients so that each client has a lead credit controller, with other language speakers used on the account as needed. This allows us to provide a personal service for both our client and the client’s customers.

Our international credit control service is available to customers of all sizes, with existing clients ranging in size from £1/2m to $1.5bn turnover. For our larger clients we provide full-time teams of credit controllers, whereas our smaller clients may require as little as 1 day service per week.

By operating shifts with relevant language skills Sterling are able to provide coverage to most countries and time-zones from one office, including Europe, the US, South America, Africa, the Middle East, Russia and parts of Asia. We are able to cover Australia and the remainder of Asia using a local strategic partner with the service under our management.

Working as an extension to your international business

Sterling’s international credit control service operates in such a manner that the outsource should be invisible to both our client’s stakeholders and their customers. We operate entirely under our client’s brand, and integrate with our client’s systems so that we become an extension of the business. This includes working directly on the client’s accounts system via remote access, adopting client email accounts, and either coming off our client’s phone system or installing dedicated phone lines that have our client’s local code. As well as meeting the key goal of prompt payment, our approach means that the customer and stakeholder experience is of a professional international team.

Access to languages

One of the reasons for choosing Krakow as a base for our European credit control service centre was the easy access to well-trained multilingual credit controllers. Krakow has developed to be the largest outsourcing centre in Europe with over 70,000 staff working in service centres, predominantly in finance functions. This has attracted many thousands of overseas professionals as well as multilingual Polish workers. This allows Sterling to recruit and retain high quality multilingual staff with almost all languages being available from the obvious European requirements of French, German, Italian and Spanish to less common skills such as Bulgarian, Romanian, Hebrew or Russian. The relatively low costs of doing business and living costs in Krakow allow for service to be provided in a cost effective manner.

Why outsource international credit control?

Outsourcing can give access to a range of skills that are not available cost effectively in an in house team. A multilingual credit control service gives access to different language skills as and when required without the cost of employing and retaining a full-time staff member. Outsourcing to Sterling ensures that your overseas invoices are paid quickly, in a customer service oriented manner.

Whether it be for European credit control, international credit control, for small businesses or global corporates, Sterling are able to help.