How Lhoest Frères cut the time spent on accounts receivable by 92%

About Lhoest Frères

In industrial construction, where the working day revolves around operations, payment follow-up often becomes a tedious task that is hard to prioritize. Lhoest Frères is no exception. The company builds, repairs and installs heating oil tanks, and works with both business customers (heating engineers, contractors, public-sector buyers) and private individuals. Managing reminders is all the harder when customers have different payment habits that each call for a tailored approach, as is the case at Lhoest.

This was a real challenge for Damien Lhoest, the company's CFO, who is solely responsible for all accounting, invoicing and administration. Between coordinating job sites, handling urgent customer requests and managing the finances, reminders often took a back seat. Follow-up became irregular, reminders went out late and months apart, and the time it took to get paid kept growing, at the expense of cash flow.

Too slow, too manual, too late

The biggest problem we had was that our follow-up was very patchy.Damien Lhoest, CFO, Lhoest Frères

Lhoest Frères handled accounting, invoicing, payment tracking and reminders in a single tool, Sage BOB 50, and its limits were starting to show, especially its very basic reminder feature.

In Sage BOB 50, Damien could see some information on invoices that had fallen due, and the software let him send standard reminder emails with a PDF attached showing the outstanding balance, or print the PDF and send it by registered mail.

But the process as a whole was still very manual: opening the AR aging report, working out which customers needed a reminder, checking the time since the last reminder and how many had already been sent, tailoring or editing the standard emails generated by Sage BOB 50, printing the registered letters… and, above all, remembering to do all of this at the right time.

Nothing was automated, so follow-up was irregular and depended on how much time Damien had available. This caused problems on several fronts:

• on average, reminders could be as much as three months apart
• seven to eight months could go by between an invoice becoming overdue and the registered letter going out
• payment times grew considerably, sometimes beyond 300 days
• legal action came late, making receivables harder to collect

All too often, when we opened a case with the collection agency, we'd find that the invoice was at least a year old… and that the customer had already gone bankrupt. If we'd known about Recovr sooner, we could have avoided that kind of situation: reminders would have gone out as soon as invoices fell due, and we could have collected the money before the customer defaulted.

The move to automation

Damien had been looking for some time for a way to modernize how reminders were handled, without replacing the entire accounting system.

I needed something automatic. I looked for an extra reminder module for our software (Sage BOB 50), but there wasn't one. Recovr offered exactly what I was looking for: a highly customizable, automated system that adapts to our business and, above all, doesn't change the way we work. One tool that covers every process we needed.

Recovr won him over straight away with:

• automated reminders,
• custom reminder workflows for each type of customer,
• a courtesy reminder before the due date,
• direct access to legal partners, with disputed cases handled right from the platform in a click,
• and a smooth integration with Sage BOB 50, with no changes to their internal setup.

A quick rollout

To start with, Damien chose semi-automated mode so he could check and approve each reminder before it went out. Quickly reassured by how reliable the process was, he switched to full automation and now lets the system handle reminders on its own.

The results showed within the first few weeks:

1. The striking effect of the courtesy reminder

Customers respond straight away, in B2C as in B2B: they react to the very first message. Every week, two or three customers reply to the email to say they had simply forgotten, and pay right away, before the invoice is even due.

2. Professional, traceable communication

The usual excuses, “I never got the invoice” or “your email went to spam”, have almost disappeared. Recovr gives a complete view of every invoice and every reminder. Reminders are clear, structured and predictable: customers know that once an invoice is overdue, a reminder will follow quickly, with legal action if needed.
Reminder emails are personalized and include the structured payment reference for the bank transfer, plus a QR code for customers who prefer to pay straight away. Each reminder also contains a link to the customer portal, where customers can view the invoice and their payment history, and pay. Damien has seen this traceability and transparency build trust and get customers responding faster.

3. Legal escalation in one click

Before, he had to find the right lawyer or contact a collection agency, gather the documents and general terms and conditions, and follow up on every disputed case… With Recovr, one click is enough to send the case to the lawyer or collection agency, who then takes over. When a registered letter or formal notice is sent on behalf of a lawyer or other legal professional, the message carries real weight and payments follow immediately.

What's great is that it's all included in the plan: all the automation, the view of payments and of the cases that need attention, and all the legal services.

Tangible results from the very first months

The effects were almost instant: within a month, we were already seeing the benefits.

Within a few weeks, time spent on follow-up fell by 92%. Damien estimates that before Recovr, he would have needed at least an hour a week on reminders and follow-up alone to get a comparable result. Now, a single hour per quarter is enough for a full review. Collection times also improved markedly, with customers paying 40 days sooner on average.

This greater efficiency shows directly in the company's financial health. The cash position has strengthened, and invoices are collected 30% faster. Since the software went live, virtually no account has gone beyond 90 days. Disputed cases have become rare: 8 have been opened since the rollout, and half of those were resolved within a few weeks, most of them in just a few days. The few that remain involve specific disputes or very old cases dating from before Recovr.

For Lhoest Frères, Recovr has done more than streamline a process: it has strengthened the company's financial health, reduced risk, improved visibility of cash flows and freed up valuable time to focus on the core business.

Recovr checks all the boxes. Automation, personalization, follow-up, speed… Peace of mind is priceless.