According to a payment study by Atradius, on average, companies write off 1.5% of their AR as bad debt (that’s $750K for a $50M company!), and 93% of businesses experience late payments.  RPA-enabled automated collections can improve these impactful statistics.

The collections process is repetitive, rule-based, and time-sensitive. This makes it a prime candidate for “hands-off” automation via Robotic Process Automation (RPA).  Additionally, as RPA can easily integrate with any (in-house or off-the-shelf) accounting software, rapid deployment of an automated collections workflow is attainable for any organization (regardless of the AR system utilized).

Utilizing RPA, the manually intensive AR collections process can be re-engineered as follows and can automatically execute on any predetermined schedule (i.e., daily, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, etc.):

• The RPA bot would initiate an AR analysis report in the accounting system to extract current open invoice data.

• Utilizing the AR analysis report, predefined collections rules, and customer contact information, the bot would automatically contact each applicable customer via e-mail and SMS (optional) regarding their past due balance.

• Customers with poor credit history, large balances and/or extended past due dates are added to an AR phone call follow-up “To Do” list in the client’s system of choice (ex. Slack, Asana, Teams Tasks, Todoist, Outlook, etc.). The task includes all customer AR details and contact information.

• After the past-due notifications are completed, and follow-up items are logged, the bot sends a daily collections activity report to the AR Manager.

• A bot would then monitor the AR Inbox for customer responses and automatically handle any customer inquiries for invoice copies by retrieving the requested invoice(s) from the Accounting system and e-mailing them back to the customer in a .PDF format.   Invoice reprint requests would be logged to the client’s system of record for future reference. Other customer e-mail inquiries would be automatically forwarded to the AR team for response.

Freeing your accounting professionals from the time-consuming and mundane tasks associated with managing delinquent AR accounts allows them to focus on higher-value activities like problem-solving, analyzing trends, and proactively communicating with customers and partners.  All while reducing bad debt expense, and improving your organization’s bottom line.

Contact us today to learn more about leveraging RPA to turbocharge your collections process and improve your financials and customer relationships.