teens with legal issues

If you have recently received a bad check from a customer, you could be wondering about your recourse. Bad checks can cost your company a lot of money, from the actual loss of the money that you were supposed to be paid to the associated fees that you could be charged by your bank. Luckily, there are a few options that you can take when it comes to collecting on a bad check.

Contact the Customer Yourself

Hopefully, the check that you received from the customer should have had the individual's name, address and telephone number on it. One good first course of action is to contact the customer yourself. A lot of the time, customers don't mean to write bad checks; they sometimes just miscalculate how much money they have in their bank accounts or have other issues. This means that in many cases, you can contact the customer and retrieve the money that is owed to you. This can be a good first step, especially if you know the customer or want to ensure that you maintain a good relationship with the people who have done business with you.

Hire a Lawyer

If you are unable to successfully recover the money that is owed to you from the customer, your next course of action might be to hire a commercial litigation attorney. Your attorney can contact the customer on your behalf, which can be helpful in some cases; many times, people get nervous when they are contacted by attorneys and do the right thing to avoid going to court. If your lawyer does not have any luck in retrieving the money, he or she might advise that you take the person to court to retrieve this money. In some cases, however, the cost of court fees might not make it worthwhile, particularly if the bad check that was written to you was small.

Sell it to a Collection Agency

One course of action is to "sell" the debt to a collection agency. Then, you won't get all of the money that you are owed, but you won't have to worry about chasing down the debt yourself. Instead, you can settle the matter once and for all, and you can allow the collection agency to worry about collecting the funds.

As you can see, you do have a few potential courses of action that you can take if you have been written a bad check at your place of business. To find out which option is your best, hire a commercial litigation attorney to help you.