From Chasing to Prioritizing: How Accounts Receivable Automation Changes the Collections Workflow

74% of finance teams spend a meaningful amount of time every week chasing down late payments, according to our 2026 Cash Flow Clarity Report. 

That hidden tax on collections shows up in the numbers that matter to finance leaders: tied-up working capital, slower, more inaccurate forecasting cycles, and higher borrowing costs. And the pressure is intensifying, with 81% of finance leaders saying that collecting open invoices is more challenging today than it was a year ago. 

These problems are solvable, but not by chasing harder. The accounts receivable (AR) teams accelerating their invoice-to-cash cycle aren't working through every overdue invoice in the queue; they're working the right ones first. Automation makes that possible, surfacing the accounts most likely to slip and freeing up working capital that would otherwise sit tied up in late receivables.

Manually chasing late customer payments takes significant time and labor. The inefficiencies built into the tools and workflows accounts receivable teams typically rely on—like email and spreadsheets—add up, creating friction in the customer experience, making cash flow harder to predict, and leaving little time for higher-value work. 

• Manually monitoring aging reports introduces a risk of error brought on through mismatched payments, outdated data, and version control issues.
• A lack of real-time visibility makes it difficult to prioritize accounts for follow-up, and can leave collections teams accidentally following up on the wrong accounts, delaying collections and bottlenecking cash flow.
• Hunting for prior call notes before follow-ups and manually sending customer emails one at a time takes up resources and limits the number of accounts your collections teams can contact on any given day.
• Re-assigning collections tasks when staff is away—for instance, asking someone new to send out payment reminders—takes additional time at the senior staff level to manage workloads and can lead to missed follow-ups when tasks aren’t fully handed off with the appropriate context.
• Digging through spreadsheets to track information like promised payments wastes time and can lead to missed follow-ups.
• Holding internal meetings to determine which accounts are most at risk of late payment and account delinquency takes extra time and, with few real data-driven insights to work with, makes it easy to miss potential risks and prioritize the wrong accounts, creating inefficient outreach and potentially damaging the customer experience.
• Working accounts in the wrong order—for instance, prioritizing by the biggest dollar amount or the longest days-overdue because that's all a spreadsheet shows—means missed opportunities for prompt collections when the customer most likely to slip might be neither.
• Trading emails and phone calls with customers to track payment status adds friction to the customer experience that can escalate to customer disputes, which are often managed just as inefficiently across those same channels. 

These inefficiencies do more than slow teams down—they send collectors after the wrong accounts. Spreadsheet-based processes and disconnected data make it hard to see which customers are actually most likely to pay late, so outreach gets distributed by gut feel instead of risk. The combined cost is lower team morale and longer days sales outstanding (DSO).

Our data shows that 56% of finance leaders expect accounts receivable automation to deliver $1 million or more in annual cash or cost benefits—much of it from resources reclaimed on collections. Among organizations with mostly or completely automated accounts receivable processes, 57% name collections as the highest-return area. 

Because all of the inefficiencies above are byproducts of manual collections, an accounts receivable automation platform built for collections eliminates or minimizes each of them. In doing so, collections automation saves teams time, enhances visibility into the invoice-to-cash cycle, and speeds up cash flow. It does so by: 

• Automating time-consuming, routine accounts receivable collections processes, from sending dunning notifications and follow-up reminders, to logging contact dates and identifying customers that require outreach.
• Analyzing payment patterns to predict which customers are likely to pay and when, to forecast cash flow more reliably, focus follow-ups, and collect faster.

• Surfacing the accounts that matter most through a collections dashboard that flags late payers, new and likely delinquents, and promise-to-pay forecasts, so finance teams know where to focus their efforts instead of working down a spreadsheet by dollar amount or days overdue.
• Setting up auto-payments through a self-service payment portal that also gives customers a direct, always-on view into how much they owe.
• Segmenting customers by risk level based on past payment behavior to better prioritize follow-up, then automatically moving customers across segments and into more tailored collections workflows as their risk level changes.
• Resolving disputes inside the workflow by letting customers log disputes, short-pay invoices, and flag discrepancies, shortening dispute timelines and keeping payment conversations from stalling collections.
• Accessing real-time analytics into DSO, promise-to-pay status, payment disputes, unapplied payments, credit limit warnings, and aging statistics to track working capital and forecasting accuracy against targets in one view.
• Prioritizing tasks and managing your collections team to automatically transfer jobs based on priority and workload. 

Take Laticrete, a provider of high-performance tile and stone installation systems and building finishing solutions, for example. Before automating its accounts receivable, the business was manually processing as many as 12,000 invoices every month. Tedious and inefficient, their collections process gave them no visibility into whether an invoice had been delivered or even opened. The customer experience was suffering as well, with friction arising from misapplied payments and mistaken follow-ups on payments that had already been settled. 

Automation helped Laticrete boost their invoice deliverability rate to 100%, decrease DSO by 11%, and improve cash flow forecasts by 16%—all while increasing cash receipts by 23%. They were also able to improve the customer experience, with a 97% adoption rate of an online payment portal leading to more direct communication and faster dispute resolution.

By removing the inefficiencies built into manual collections, accounts receivable automation does more than ease the daily workload. It shortens DSO, tightens forecasts, and protects working capital. Done well, this work is so proactive that many invoices never become past due in the first place. Instead of chasing, your team prioritizes, and increasingly, prevents.