Ask anyone who runs accounts receivable at a high-volume business to describe their morning, and you’ll hear a version of the same story. A remittance file lands with three hundred line items: partial amounts, missing invoice references, two currencies, a customer who paid four invoices with one wire and told no one which four. Someone on the team spends the first three hours of the day matching it to open receivables by hand. While that’s happening, forty collection follow-ups need to go out, templated, sent one at a time, tracked in a spreadsheet that only one person really understands.
By noon, the AR team has spent half its day on work that required, by my count, zero judgment.
That’s the collections equation. And I want to be precise about why it matters, because it’s easy to file this under “productivity” and move on. It isn’t a productivity problem. It’s a working-capital problem wearing a productivity problem’s clothes.
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