Redundancy!

I was at the Receivables Management Association of Canada’s Annual General Meeting this week, talking to some colleagues, and one of the topics that came up is a credit card merchant company had decided to arbitrarily end their services with several agencies.  That’s not great for anyone (the consumers, the credit card merchant company, and certainly the collection agencies).  And this sort of thing fuels my paranoia ...

If a collection agency has a single location, a single database server, a single telephone service provider, a single IT employee, a single credit card merchant provider, if something breaks, the whole process of collections grinds to a halt.

I can think of all sorts of times things broke, either internally at companies I worked for, or externally.

I briefly worked for a collection agency called FCA (Financial Collection Agency) in Hamilton back in the 90's – the database crashed pretty much every other day, and they handed us reams of paper to work from until it was restored (maybe hours later).  Huge amounts of wasted time working from paper, and then entering the day's notes manually when the system came back up.

I lived through the postal strike back in the late 90’s where we had to scramble drivers to go pick up cheques from consumers (the postal strike of 2024 was a lot less disruptive with electronic banking).

I was in my Gatineau office in early 2023 when something went wrong with Bell Canada’s internet infrastructure, taking out chunks of Ontario and Quebec, and borking our inter-company network for half a day.

These are just a few examples of hundreds of things that can go wrong.  So what to do about it?  Redundancies!  Wherever you can.  Have a backup system for everything possible.

People laughed at me when back in 2012 I launched a multi-branch company with offices in multiple locations.  I was told by colleagues in our industry that it was an unnecessary expense.  You know what that has helped with?  Power outages, phone server outages, internet outages, pandemics – that small redundancy has greatly helped weather problems with a minimum of disruption that the outside world can see (internally, our IT folks were running about and flailing while they put things back together, but that’s part of being an IT person).

When do you want to build redundancies?  Now, before it’s an issue.  Get a backup phone server, an alternate VOIP service provider, some extra UPS power supplies, a second credit card merchant account, cross-train your essential staff – it’s more work now, but a lot less headache tomorrow when something, possibly, inevitably breaks.

And *after* you have those redundancies in place, test them, log that you tested them, and down the road if you need to be audited for a Continuity of Business Plan, or your SOC-2 compliance, roll out your logs and reports. 

Need suggestions on alternate service providers?  Happy to share who I use, drop me a line at blair@receivableaccounts.com.

Cheers,

Blair DeMarco-Wettlaufer
KINGSTON Data & Credit
Cambridge, Ontario
226-946-1730
blair@receivableaccounts.com