Many clients add training days to account with us. This has a number of benefits; improving discounted buying terms, making it easier to book ongoing training – especially if you optionally wish to allow others to book their own training – and accounts can lock in funding which may be available from time to time.
In practice these days of training, which can be exchanged for any day of open training or towards qualifications, remain on a client’s account until they are used.
Dormant accounts
However, in certain situations, some of the days which are added to account are not used by clients. This is often due to events such as clients being acquired, restructures, redundancies or the final few days of large purchases being in excess of ultimate requirement.
In these cases, days left on these dormant accounts cause us challenges.
So if an account has no booking history at all in twelve months, or we have no prior notification that a client wishes their account to be dormant for a period of 12 months, we deduct one day from account. These are our current terms.
This affects only a very small number of accounts.
However, in some cases accounts become dormant with larger numbers of days on account and it can take several years for us to clear days from those accounts, creating problems around how we allocate resources to ‘live’ clients, where and how we put on courses and how we account for our future liabilities.
Future change
For these reasons we’re changing our dormant account charges from 1st November 2020. Whilst the above terms will remain in place, we will also be completely clearing all accounts with remaining days after three dormant years. That’s accounts that have not made any bookings at all with us – even if it’s for courses into the future – for three years and still have days on account.
This will affect only a tiny number of the hundreds of accounts which are set up annually.
Naturally we’d rather every client used all of their days on account and maximised their value. Almost all, of course, do. But in order to maintain the integrity of those accounts, we need to be able to see and account for the ‘live’ days undistorted.
