AI agents for AR exceptions
AI agents for the AR exceptions rules-based tools hand back
Short pays, lump-sum payments with no remittance, parent companies paying under another name, remittance stuck in an email or AP portal, and disputes. These are the exceptions that eat an AR team’s week. Fazeshift’s AI agents work them.
What are AR exceptions, and how do AI agents handle them?
AR exceptions are the payments and invoices that don’t fit a rule: short pays, lump-sum ACH with no remittance, parent-company payments under a different name, remittance stuck in an email or a customer’s AP portal, and disputes. Rules-based AR automation matches the clean ones and sends these back to a person. Fazeshift’s AI agents work them: they connect context across your ERP, bank, inbox and portals, find why cash is stuck, and execute the next step, with your team approving whatever it chooses to.
Reviewed by Caitlin Leksana, Co-founder & CEO · Updated November 3, 2026
Where AR teams spend their time
Most of the time-consuming work in AR begins after a system identifies something overdue or unmatched. Someone still has to investigate what happened, find the supporting information, decide who needs to act, and drive the issue to resolution.
Rules match on exact fields. When a customer pays $9,400 against a $10,000 invoice, pays three subsidiaries’ invoices in one wire, or sends the remittance in a PDF attached to an email, the rule has nothing to match on, and the payment lands in a queue.
Five exceptions, five different next steps
The same unapplied payment or past-due balance can hide very different problems. Each needs its own action, not another reminder.
Short pay
The customer sent cash, but deducted a charge.
The agent applies what arrived, flags the difference, and routes it to your team with the remittance and what it found, such as a pricing disagreement, a deduction or missing delivery documentation.
Lump sum with no remittance
One payment, many invoices, no explanation.
The agent matches it from the amount, the customer’s payment history and the open invoices, and applies it when it’s confident. When it isn’t, a person gets the candidate invoices and the agent’s best-fit recommendation.
Parent-child payment
The money arrived under the wrong name.
A parent company pays for several subsidiaries in one wire. The agent uses entity relationships, payment history and remittance to split it across the right invoices and accounts, with review where needed.
Remittance in another system
The answer is in an email or a customer’s AP portal.
The agent reads remittance from email bodies and attachments, scanned checks and customers’ AP portals, connects it to the payment, and hands it to cash application.
Dispute or broken billing
Another reminder would make things worse.
When a customer says an invoice is wrong or a PO is missing, the agent recognizes it in the conversation, stops treating it as a reminder problem, and routes it to the right person with the context attached.
Worked example: a $9,400 payment on a $10,000 invoice
The payment arrives
A $9,400 ACH lands in the bank feed. The remittance is a PDF attached to an email in your AR inbox.
The agent reads the remittance
It finds the invoice number and a note about a deducted charge, and matches the payment to the $10,000 invoice.
It applies what arrived and flags the rest
$9,400 is applied to the invoice. The $600 difference is flagged as a short pay, with the remittance and the email attached.
A person decides
Your team sees what the agent found and what it recommends, approves the application, and resolves the $600 with the customer or as a deduction.
The work lands in your ERP
The approved application posts back to your ERP, the system of record, and the decision becomes the rule the next time the same case comes up.
What it looks like in production
90–95%
of cash application automated: the range customers typically see.
- PDQ’s story
About 75%
less manual cash application work at PDQ.
- AdVon’s story
80+ hours
a month back for AdVon’s team, with AR capacity per person more than tripled.
170,000+
email remittances detected and routed into cash application across customers.
Your team stays in control
You decide, scenario by scenario, what runs automatically and what waits for a person. Most teams start with review on and turn on automatic posting for the cases they trust after they’ve seen the results. Every action is kept in the audit history, with the evidence behind it.
Frequently asked questions
Straight answers about AI agents and AR exceptions.
Bring us your hardest exceptions
Bring a few of the payments your team works by hand today, and see how the agents handle them.
90–95% of cash application automated: the range customers typically see.