Common Accounts Receivable Problems and Solutions
Avoid common accounts receivable problems that damage cash flow. Learn how to manage credit wisely, implement online payments, create penalty systems for late payers, and maintain communication with customers for healthy receivables.
Summary
- Run credit checks before extending credit - Not all customers pay debts on time; some waste hours of collection effort only to pay late or never; running credit checks and using rating systems prevents offering credit to financially unhealthy companies
- Online payments reduce phone calls and speed collection - Customers who can access open invoices to see detailed information and pay online make fewer phone calls with questions, and payments arrive earlier than with paper checks and phone credit cards
- Penalty systems prevent habitual late payments - Without consequences like late fees or credit cutoff until payments are made in full, customers who pay late once will pay late more often; extreme cases require terminating credit and switching to pay-as-you-go
- Communication breakdowns create embarrassing double-calls - When one team member knows about customer payment arrangements but others do not, your accounts receivable department calls customers who already talked to someone else, reflecting poorly on your business
- Need help streamlining accounts receivable? See how Tallyfy creates organized AR workflows
Whether you’re starting a new business or trying to grow one, the accounting department in your company is essential to your success. It can also cause you endless troubles and woes.
This department tackles two major jobs for your business, accounts payable and accounts receivable. Of these two, accounts receivable is probably the fun part of owning a company.
Accounts receivable is the money that is owed to your company. This owed money mostly comes from goods and services that you’ve sold to your customers.
Of course, it’s not enough to have open accounts receivable. The money has to actually arrive to cover the amounts owed and get correctly processed.
Hiring competent staff members for your accounting department is the first step to ensure that your accounts receivable come in and get applied where they’re needed. Of course, there are some common mistakes made in this area that you can try and avoid.
Here are a few of the most common accounts receivable mistakes.
Credit in accounts receivable
When you first open a business or attempt a growth spurt, it seems really easy to extend credit to all of your customers and boost sales. This can be an accounts receivable nightmare.
Not all of your customers are going to be as good about paying their debts as you need them to be. That’s just reality. In some cases, your accounts receivable department might waste hours trying to get payments, only to have them arrive late or not at all. Cash flow killer.
To keep your accounts receivable department running smoothly, be very careful about who you extend credit to. This might mean that some of your orders are smaller since the customer needs to pre-pay it, but in the long run, it’s worth the caution.
Let your customers build credit with you slowly and restrict anyone who takes advantage of the payment arrangements.
The other credit mistake that businesses commonly make is not running a credit check on all of their customers. Just because your mom’s best friend’s uncle runs the company doesn’t mean it pays its bills on time.
Running a credit check helps your accounts receivable department get a clearer picture of the other company’s financial health before offering credit terms.
Ask your accounts receivable staff to run credit checks on each new customer and use a rating system to determine if opening an account is appropriate.
You also need processes in place to figure out how much credit to offer and extend larger amounts of credit as the company meets the terms of the credit account.
If you are looking for a structured way to manage your accounts receivable workflows, Tallyfy provides tools specifically designed for AR processes.
Accounts Receivable Made Easy
Not offering online payments
Who loves writing a check, sticking it in an envelope, buying a stamp and mailing a payment? Based on hundreds of implementations we have supported, almost nobody prefers this approach.
In our digital world where customers shop online, they need a way to pay online as well. Your accounts receivable department needs to offer an easy way for customers to access their open invoices to see detailed information and then a way to pay them online as well.
With an online payment system in place, your company’s accounts receivable department might find that they receive fewer phone calls with questions about invoices and payments made earlier than when they only accepted paper checks and credit card payments by phone. One mental health services team we worked with had providers generating custom invoice forms and managing payment information through multiple disconnected systems. Consolidating this into a single workflow where both the provider and finance team could track invoice status eliminated the back-and-forth phone calls that were consuming administrative time.
Of course, your account receivable department needs processes in place to update the software between the office and online payment system to keep the information accurate and current.
A penalty system for late payments in accounts receivable
It happens to all businesses at some point. For whatever reason, a company makes a late payment.
The cause can be anything from a cash flow issue to turnover in their accounting department. But if your accounts receivable doesn’t have a penalty system in place for late payments, then you’ll find them making late payments more often.
In some cases, you may want to overlook late payments for a steady client who contacts your accounts receivable staff in advance of an issue.
This penalty system created by your accounts receivable team can be anything from a late fee charge to cut off their credit until payments are made in full.
In extreme circumstances, you may need to terminate their ability to use credit with your company and stick with a pay-as-you-go policy.
You need to decide on an account receivable policy for dealing with late payers.
Another option to encourage payments is to offer incentives for paying off outstanding invoices early. Your accounts receivable staff can reach out to larger clients and offer them a small percentage off of their total invoice if the company pays early.
No matter what decisions you make, the goal is always to keep your accounts receivable flowing.
Can your AR wait?
Are you hearing this at work? That's busywork
Enter between 1 and 150,000
Enter between 0.5 and 40
Enter between $10 and $1,000
Based on $30/hr x 4 hrs/wk
Your loss and waste is:
every week
What you are losing
Cash burned on busywork
per week in wasted wages
What you could have gained
160 extra hours could create:
per week in real and compounding value
Total cumulative impact over time (real cost + missed opportunities)
You are bleeding cash, annoying every employee and killing dreams.
It's a no-brainer
Not keeping the lines of communication open
Sometimes improving the success rate of your accounts receivable department is just a matter of improving communication.
This can be anything from reaching out to a customer to improving communication within the office.
In some cases, the customer’s accounting department might not be as effective as your company’s staff. A payment date might slip by without them realizing that they needed to send a payment.
It might be a simple case that they had a question about an invoice, put the invoice in a file to call about it later, and promptly forgot about it.
You need your accounts receivable department to have open lines of communication with all of your customers.
Another area of communication errors can occur within your own accounts receivable department. If a customer calls in with questions or to make arrangements for an invoice, it’s easy for one member of the team to know about and others not.
You don’t want your accounts receivable department calling a customer who’s already talked to someone else in the same department. It reflects poorly on your business. One payments processing team we worked with had similar coordination challenges - their A/R aging report reviews, commission calculations, and subscription revenue tracking all involved 6+ team members working across 25 business days each month. Without clear task ownership and handoff visibility, the same customer could receive multiple conflicting communications.
Taking a peek from time to time at your customer’s financial health
Even if you run a credit check before opening an account for your customer, they might experience financial difficulties down the road.
You can have your accounts receivable department run credit checks on current customers occasionally. But this can get expensive if you’ve got a lot of large customers with credit accounts.
You need to have your accounts receivable department run a report to look at each customer’s long-term behavior with things, such as order sizes and payments, to see if there are any red flags.
There is risk management software available that can analyze each of your customers to find any potential problems.
At Tallyfy, we know how important it is to have your accounts receivable department running smoothly. It’s the lifeblood of your company and helps you grow as needed.
With our program, you can create your own process for accounts receivable in just a few minutes. You can organize the process to include multiple employees or restrict it to only essential staff in your accounting department.
As part of our program, your company can allow your customers to access certain steps in the process that make it easier for you to get a clear picture of your accounts receivable at any given moment.
Please feel free to watch our short video or contact us directly to learn more about how streamlining your processes benefits not only your accounts receivable but most departments in your company.
Accounts receivable workflow templates
About the Author
Amit is the CEO of Tallyfy. He is a workflow expert and specializes in process automation and the next generation of business process management in the post-flowchart age. He has decades of consulting experience in task and workflow automation, continuous improvement (all the flavors) and AI-driven workflows for small and large companies. Amit did a Computer Science degree at the University of Bath and moved from the UK to St. Louis, MO in 2014. He loves watching American robins and their nesting behaviors!
Follow Amit on his website, LinkedIn, Facebook, Reddit, X (Twitter) or YouTube.
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