关于组织应收账款管理战略方针：一些经验证据【外文翻译】.doc

原文： A Strategic Approach on Organizing Accounts Receivable Management: Some Empirical Evidence 1. Introduction Firms rarely require immediate payment for their merchandise. For example, in the UK corporate sector more than 80% of daily business transactions are on credit terms and accounts receivable constitute one of the main assets on corporate balance sheets (35% of total assets) As soon as trade debtors settle their accounts, cash flows into the company. At the same time, however, new sales generate new accounts receivable. The level of debtors thus remains constant when sales figures are stable, while it grows as sales figures increase. Although firms extending trade credit heavily invest in accounts receivable, the resulting financial need is not the only reason why trade credit decisions merit more careful attention. This paper develops and discusses two additional considerations. First, firms selling on credit open themselves to moral hazard. When exchange relations are subject to imperfect information, this uncertainty results in transaction costs. Sellers thus have incentives to develop organizational structures that reduce the transaction costs resulting from this asymmetric information problem. Both homemade planning and sales structuring as well as balanced product and market portfolios can reduce this uncertainty, while externalization of risk becomes attractive when these homemade institutions fail. Second, vendors offering trade credit have to adopt a variety of new responsibilities: the decision whether or not to grant credit to a (new) customer, the assumption of credit-,administration- and collection-policies and the bearing of the credit risk involved. From a managerial point of view this means that the seller 1) finances the buyer’s inventory, 2) engages in additional accounting and collecting activities, 3) monitors the financial health of both existing and potential customers and 4) gets involved in assessing and bearing new risks. Not all