AR in 2022: Q & A: Goals & Metrics

Q. What are your top 3 goals for AR in 2022?

– Implement automation to help with manual tasks/57%

– Reduce delays in cash flow/54%

– Improve customer communication?48%

– Identify opportunities for efficiency gains/47%

– Focus talent on more value-added tasks/39%

– Other/6%
(Source: 2022 AR Pulse Check Survey)

Q. What are the top 3 metrics chosen to gauge AR performance?

– Days Sales Outstanding/56%

– Staff Productivity/52%

– Collective Effectiveness Index/42%

– Customer Satisfaction/40%

– Turnover Ratio/33%

– Revised Invoices/26%

– Other /13%

(Source: 2022 AR Pulse Check Survey)

Q. I’m experiencing pushback from some of our customers about paying via ACH – either they don’t have the capabilities – technically or know-how – or they balk at the small fees associated with ACH payments. I’d like to consider a payment portal platform that potentially gives them a secure link to provide banking details and speed up the payment process. We’re getting mired in slow paying customers via checks (USPS, UPS, FedEx) and I feel this is a potential to expedite cash inflows.

Any experiences, good or bad, using providers? for both the customers and your collections/AR teams? What are the costs (per-use or flat fee?)? User interface

• If you use QuickBooks online, you just have to turn on payments in there (you don’t have to accept credit cards but can for an additional fee). Your customers can electronically pay via QuickBooks at no cost to them.

• I like implementing Invoiced for our clients when we have the opportunity. Plays well with multiple CRMs and will integrate basically out of the box with most ERPs and accounting solutions. We are partners with invoiced actually so if interested let me know should be able to help negotiate pricing down.)

• OnPay Solutions

• OneInc

  Both have payment portal capabilities. OneInc focuses on insurance but has the capability to do other things.
  All of these vendors are short staffed. Make sure payment terms and implementation times lines are aligned.

• I’ve seen Plaid used in the past. The three customers you mention however are such big companies that they are not likely going to use anything other than their process. I’ve had some of them as customers in the past and they manage cash by slow walking the payments. They also aren’t typically interested in a separate process with their different vendors.

• We just moved from authorize.net to StaxPay, which is a bit more of a fintech so it has a lot of bells and whistles. We have about 40% of our customers pay with an ACH. I will tell you the downside that no one wants to tell you is that once a payment gets sent, it can’t be voided. Since you are dealing with individual banks on the back-end, it could take days for the transaction to actually settle. So for some reason if you accidentally processed an ACH twice, it’s going to get pulled from the bank twice. Depending on the size this can be a real issue. Just learned some hard lessons on this recently

• There are solutions for biller direct payments which include a link on your website for your customers to view and pay their bills. Which bank do you use? Typically banks offer this service to their commercial customer.