Every Collection Call Ends in a Promise. Log It.

What is a promise to pay in collections?

A collection call has one deliverable: a promise to pay, or PTP. A specific amount, on a specific date, through a specific channel. Sana i-GCash ko po sa Biyernes, ₱4,000. That sentence is data. If your collector hangs up, says the borrower will settle, and nothing gets written down, the call produced a feeling instead of a fact.

Untracked promises cost you twice. First, nobody follows up on the promised date, so a broken promise goes unnoticed for weeks. Second, you learn nothing about which borrowers, and which collectors, produce promises that actually turn into pesos.

How do you log a PTP in ten seconds?

A PTP record needs five fields, nothing more:

• The account and the person who promised
• Amount promised
• Date promised
• Channel, such as GCash, over the counter, or bank transfer
• Who took the promise

Then the system does the part humans forget: on the promised date, it checks whether a payment matching the promise actually posted. Payment arrives, the PTP is marked kept. The date passes with no payment, it is marked broken and the account goes back to the top of the collections queue automatically, the very next day. Not three weeks later when someone rereads the sheet.

Kept versus broken: the rate that predicts everything

Once promises are logged, you can compute the PTP kept rate: promises kept divided by promises made. Track it three ways and each one answers a different question.

Per borrower. A borrower who has kept 9 of 10 promises and misses one is a timing problem. A borrower on their fourth consecutive broken promise is not going to be fixed by a fifth call. That account needs escalation or restructuring, and the record makes the decision for you. No more extending goodwill by memory.

Per collector. Two collectors can log the same number of calls with wildly different kept rates. One negotiates realistic amounts on realistic dates. The other accepts any promise just to end the call. Without kept rates, both look equally busy. With them, you know who to imitate and who to coach.

Per portfolio. This is the forward looking one. Your overall kept rate this month predicts your recoveries next month. If you hold ₱300,000 of open promises and your historical kept rate is 60 percent, you can pencil in roughly ₱180,000 of recoveries from that pipeline. When the kept rate slides from 60 to 45 percent, your future collections just fell, weeks before the daily cash numbers show it. That early warning is the whole prize.

What a working PTP loop looks like

In a lending system built for this, the loop closes itself. A collector logs a promise during the call. The account leaves the active queue until the promised date, so nobody wastes a call on a borrower who has already committed. On the date, the system matches posted payments against the promise. Kept promises update the borrower's record. Broken ones resurface the account with the failure visible, so the next call starts from we agreed on Friday instead of from zero.

Management sees one small dashboard: open promises in pesos, kept rate this month versus last, and the accounts with multiple breaks that need a decision rather than a call.

Start before the software if you have to

You can begin this week with a dedicated sheet: account, amount, date, channel, taken by, kept or broken. The discipline will leak, because sheets always leak, but even a leaky version will show you your kept rate for the first time. When the number starts driving decisions, that is the signal it deserves a system that never forgets a promised date.