Here’s what your accounts receivable process is costing (and where those costs are hiding)

Spreadsheets with more tabs than you can explain (updated by hand and scrutinized), an inbox with collections emails going back months, and numbers that are near impossible to produce if leadership asked for them today. Your accounts receivable runs on manual effort: follow-up emails, phone calls, spreadsheets with unknown logic that were built by past employees. This ‘system’ is the result of habits that formed because nothing better was in place.

In practice, this likely means reminders are sent to customers who’ve already paid, invoices that quietly age past 90-days before anyone notices, and a true cost-of-collection that’s never been calculated as processes aren’t standardized. When errors like these repeat across accounts your team manages by hand, the collections figures you’d report to leadership today are closer to estimates than something defensible. 

Your financials are centralized: invoices are sent on a schedule, days sales outstanding (DSO) is tracked, an aging report exists and mostly holds up. Your accounts receivable processes aren’t entirely manual, yet they likely still sit apart from the bigger picture: reconciled too late, pulled together at month-end, with data spread across multiple ‘sources of truth’.

This comes with a cost, even if it doesn’t show up as a single bad number: an hour lost reconciling the same figure across multiple systems before a leadership meeting; a dispute that gets resolved, but not before it throws off next month’s forecast; a short-pay or bad debt that isn’t flagged as part of a larger pattern. Left alone, this compounds, and 78% of leaders say this kind of erosion forces changes to strategic decisions like investments, borrowing, and hiring.

Your invoicing and collections processes ‘mostly’ run themselves: invoice volume has scaled without needing to scale headcount, reminders go out on schedule, and most payments come in and get applied without anyone chasing them down. Your operations aren’t dependent on manual work and receivables aren’t siloed from the broader company. 

But ‘mostly’ isn’t ‘fully’. The accounts that need attention (like those customers sliding toward delinquency, or whose payments don’t neatly match their invoices, or with disputes that need escalating) still tend to surface as they always have, with someone noticing too late. Your process isn’t  broken, but it’s reactive, and reactivity doesn’t cleanly scale. 

Well done! Payments mostly move without anyone chasing them. Invoicing, customer communication, and reporting run as one connected experience instead of a patchwork of tools. Your team spends its time on judgment calls, instead of data entry, and by any reasonable definition, this is what ‘lean and proactive’ looks like.

But automation was never the finish line; it was simply the foundation. While 63% of businesses have reduced payment delays through automation, finance leaders increasingly view these improvements as only the beginning. In fact, 82% plan to increase investment in automation over the next 12 months, signalling that CFOs see today’s returns as a foundation for strengthening cash flow resilience and forecast confidence.

Artificial intelligence will define the next phase of this evolution. 50% of finance leaders anticipate using AI to automate repetitive AR tasks, and nearly as many (47%) anticipate AI-lead improvements in efficiency. Both will allow finance teams to redirect time and attention toward analysis, customer engagement, and higher-value decision support.