[EE-BO]

When you have attorneys and business owners who are active alumni, it is very easy to go after people in the right way on your own. However, that does assume such people are in place. If they are not, then a service like GreekBill or Omega might make sense.

I just wanted to point out there are alternatives, and also that the cheapest plans do not get one the best service. Current officers in my chapter (where I am now an advisor) were told when they called GreekBill that our plan did not include sending people to collections.

When I was active in my chapter, we did not have any outside service at all. It was real simple, if you did not pay your rent in the house- the legal procedures for eviction required in the state of Texas were initiated. Period. The Housing Corporation did not tolerate people who would not pay their rent. That is part of the deal when alumni drop millions on a house and then take time from their personal lives to manage it and make ongoing investments as needed.

Dues were the same. If you did not pay your dues, you were suspended from social events. And if you got a semester in arrears without a legitimate financial hardship, you had a choice of resigning or going through an internal procedure that could result in losing your roll number. If a guy had legitimate financial issues, the chapter could go with other alternatives, but a deadbeat without an excuse lost his roll number. Period.

There is something to be said for using a very basic Greekbill service to send a professional invoice home and get it paid. It can be very helpful- and whether it is worth the expense is up to the chapter.

However, it is dangerous to assume that such a service provides more guarantees of collection than are actually the case. Rent is one thing- but social dues in a fraternity are another.

Ultimately, if a chapter is having a serious problem with collecting dues- the solution is not to spend more money on a billing service, but to take a close hard look at why people are not paying their dues.

Do members not feel they are getting their money's worth?

Are a lot of the people being initiated not telling their parents and then trying to pay their dues out of their monthly allowance or student loans? (which almost never ends up happening given the size of the average college student's budget)

Are some members seeing other members get by with not paying on time and feel they have a right to do the same? (this is a big one!)

These are the kinds of problems that have to be addressed at the front end, not after the fact.

Again, for administrative purposes there is value in these billing services. But if collections are a serious problem, it is dangerous to assume these services will get you all that money at little to no cost.

Standard first placement collections fees are 30-50% of the amount to be collected (first placement meaning they are the first agency to attempt collection of funds.) So why would any service out there do a full collection on a $400-2,000 dues bill when they are only being paid $15 per semester per active to do billing AND "collection" procedures?

If you take away the trouble cases and send them to another agency as a second placement- the collection commission goes up, as high as 80% since it is unlikely the debt will be paid.

So here you are actually in a worse situation than if you handled collections internally.

There is not any big conspiracy here- but retaining a billing and collections service is a serious step. And a contract should be carefully reviewed by an alumnus with some legal and/or financial experience.

The danger I see is chapters just signing up with these companies and going with the cheapest plan assuming all will be okay. This is not something wrong with the companies in question- the details will all be in the contract and it is the chapter's duty to make sure what they are getting is what they think they are getting.