Changing Your Remit Address – Lessons Learned

Are you moving to a new location, adopting a lockbox process for depositing funds, moving from a lockbox process back to in-house processing? All of these shifts can require a remit address change for your customers. While this happens every day in the business world, getting customers to update their accounts payable process with your new address can sometimes be a tall order. Here are some tips and tricks to help migrate your customers as quickly as possible.

• Be prepared to continue to receive mail at your old remit address and new address for several months after the change; have a plan to handle items from both places.
• Include a buck slip with your invoices alerting the customer of a change; doing this for a couple of months (depending on your invoicing cycles) will normally get 60-80 percent of your customer base to convert.
• Alert your collections and customer service teams early.
• Update your W4 with the new remit address; share it with internal customer contact teams.
• Your larger customers may ask for a letter from an officer of your company on company letter head; have one written up and ready to sign and send.
• Have your collections team add an attention grabbing tagline to their email signatures advertising the new remit address.
• Monitor your old remit address for a volume change: especially watch for large payments continuing to go to the old address and be prepared to call individual customers who miss all the signs.
• The very last step: have payments returned to customers who continue to send their payments to the old remit address – but only when the volume is minuscule to allow minimal impact to your DSO.

Using these tips as a guide should ensure your remit change goes as smoothly as possible. Please share your best practices regarding remit address changes in the comments.