How Automation Helps Collectors Prioritize the Right Accounts, and Get Paid Sooner

81% of finance teams say collecting outstanding receivables is a significant challenge. 

Done manually, collections is time-consuming and resource-intensive. It requires strong organizational skills to track accounts, gut instincts to prioritize follow-up, and people skills to keep customers happy and resolve disputes. Collectors carry it all: mapping outreach, deciding next steps, and managing the day through spreadsheets and to-do lists. 

Automated task management, streamlined workflows, and prioritization recommendations change that. They take the daily triage off the collector's plate to build more confident cash flow, without the burnout. 

To get a clear picture of what that shift looks like on the ground, we spoke with Jodi Bergman, Senior Director of Product Management at Versapay, who has spent years working alongside collections teams to understand how they actually spend their days, and where the daily work breaks down.

69% of finance leaders report that late B2B payments have increased over the past year. For collectors working manually, that means more accounts in the pipeline and a longer to-do list with the same hours in the day.

Here's what those days look like, and what changes when the work is organized for them instead of by them, before they even log in.

Collectors have a lot on their to-do list: sending dunning notifications, following up by phone, negotiating payment plans, and resolving disputes. Often, there’s too much to accomplish in a given day, so collectors have to decide what’s urgent and what can wait. 

The trouble is that without the right signals, many end up giving every account roughly equal attention—or working from gut feel rather than evidence. That looks like progress on the surface, but when energy goes to the wrong accounts, cash flow stays stuck.

With data scattered across spreadsheets, emails, enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools, and collectors’ own notes, building a prioritized list means stitching information together by hand. Since it’s difficult for collectors to organize tasks based on information like risk of non-payment, this means they largely lean on gut instinct and memory of past customer behavior. 

Not only is this system fallible, but when these understandings live only in a collector’s head, there’s also no shared visibility into those institutional insights. Meaning, when a collector takes a vacation or leaves a company, all that context walks out the door with them.

Collections automation replaces the spreadsheet patchwork with a single task list, organized by status: new, in progress, overdue, and escalated. Instead of portfolio-level dashboards meant for managers, collectors see only the work they own. 

Automated workflows auto-generate that list based on triggers set once and applied consistently—no daily rebuild. Collectors log notes, calls, and follow-ups in the same place, so context travels with the account if a teammate steps in.

Once invoices drift too far past due, collections activity loses its bite. Collectors are working against a clock, and a long queue of overdue payments means triaging delinquent accounts by risk—not just by dollar amount or days overdue.

Without a clear picture of customer payment history, collectors give every late invoice roughly the same energy or default to sorting by dollar value or days overdue. As a result, higher-risk accounts slip through, and bad debt creeps up. 

Collectors also rely on their own processes, instincts, and relationships with customers to determine the next best step to take for each customer. But they don’t always land on the right approach. For example, following up with a low-risk customer too aggressively (with a phone call, for example) can add friction to the customer experience. But waiting to follow up with a riskier customer can extend their inaction. The right action varies by customer, and figuring it out account by account is mentally expensive—and operationally expensive for the business, because every misjudged outreach slows cash flow.

Automated collections solutions that use AI to predict when invoices will be paid take the guesswork out of prioritization, scoring accounts by risk and likelihood to pay. That score drives segmentation, so collectors aren’t guessing which accounts deserve the first call of the morning. 

From there, automated workflows handle the next-best-action layer. Each segment gets its own cadence—high-touch for risky accounts, lighter-touch for reliable payers—so collectors know when to call, when to email, and when to escalate.

A large part of collectors’ jobs is following up with customers on late invoices and working with them to facilitate payments and keep cash flowing. While some customers may need nothing but a simple reminder, others require collectors to create payment plans or negotiate a promise-to-pay. A one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work—every customer’s situation is different and it’s up to collectors to understand that.

In a manual environment, following up with delinquent customers can be challenging, requiring multiple touches before collectors even reach the person they need. That's time gone before any negotiation begins. And without visibility into historical payment behavior, collectors are guessing whether to push for immediate payment, accept a promise-to-pay, or offer a more flexible payment plan.

Automated outreach handles the predictable touches—reminders, dunning sequences, status updates—so collectors aren’t repeatedly writing the same emails. When a customer replies, the response lands in a unified activity view next to their full payment history. Collectors reply directly from there, with the context already in front of them. 

Call logging works the same way. Record the call, drop a note, and the next person who touches the account sees the full thread. Promise-to-pay dates and customer commitments get tracked automatically, so nothing falls through. The payoff is time. With routine follow-ups handled, collectors spend more of their day on the conversations that actually move money, and on the relationships that prevent the next overdue invoice.

When a customer does have an issue with an invoice—whether it be a misapplied payment, duplicate billing, unapplied credit, service issues, or something else entirely—they may choose to open a dispute with the collections team. It’s up to collectors to resolve the issue in a timely way, or escalate it to a higher authority.

Resolving a dispute starts by understanding it. In the case of misapplied payments, duplicate billing, or unapplied credits, for instance, that means looking into the perceived error. But in a manual accounts receivable environment, collectors must search through disparate data sources to find out the truth behind the customer’s claim, dragging the dispute out longer and risking further damage to the customer relationship. 

In some cases—when customers have issues with the quality of a service or product provided, dispute the price or charges accrued, or point out discrepancies with the original purchase order, for instance—collectors may have to choose whether to write off a payment, negotiate new terms, or escalate the dispute further by sending it to a manager. When information is siloed, only limited context is available to base those decisions on, or to pass on to the next person.

With automation, invoice details, payment terms, and cash application all sit in the same view, so collectors can validate a claim in minutes instead of hours. Call recordings, notes, and email threads also stay attached to the account. Modern collection automation solutions also let collectors escalate disputes to their manager with one click, ensuring a quick process that adds limited friction to the customer experience.

Collectors are critical to the human parts of the job: reading a customer, negotiating a plan, knowing when to push and when to wait. Manual processes waste those skills on triage—whether that’s assembling lists, hunting for context, or deciding what to do next. Automation takes that triage off the table, so what’s left is the work that actually moves cash: the conversations, the negotiations, the relationships. 

And instead of chasing, the collector can prioritize, and increasingly, prevent. 

That’s why Versapay Collections is built around the way collectors actually work. A new tasks and workflows experience auto-generates prioritized to-do lists based on triggers you set, so collectors walk in daily with a clear view of what’s new, in progress, overdue, and escalated, without rebuilding the list every morning. 

Underneath, AI that predicts when each invoice is likely to be paid helps score accounts by risk, segmentation routes the right outreach cadences to the right customers, and a unified activity view keeps every call, note, and email attached to the account. When escalation is needed, it’s one click, with the full history along for the ride.