- Guide
- Finance
The fastest path to AI ROI in finance starts with AR
Why AR and cash application are usually the highest-yield first AI workflow in finance, and how to prove it inside 90 days.
- Report
- Accounts receivable
The Collections Benchmark: what actually gets customers to respond
Most collections teams don’t have a bad-customer problem. They have two others: follow-up that isn’t consistent, and not knowing why an invoice is actually stuck. This benchmark covers both, tactic by tactic.
This report includes:
Consistency is fixable with discipline: follow-ups that go out late, messaging that varies by collector, personalization done by hand. Working out why each invoice is stuck, whether it is a dispute, a missing PO, or cash that already arrived and was never matched, is harder to do by hand at any scale. This field guide for finance and AR teams takes both in turn.
- Subject lines: why neutral beats aggressive and specific beats vague, with lower- and higher-performing examples side by side.
- Personalization: a structured template that pulls the invoice number, amount, due date, customer name, last touch, and known blocker automatically.
- Timing: a baseline cadence that starts before the due date and beats occasional urgency.
- Message anatomy: the four things every high-performing collections email does, in under 40 words.
- A customer story on when the ERP’s own collections tool becomes the bottleneck, and third-party data on the gap.
- A seven-question scorecard to run as a team.
Who this is for
- AR and collections managers whose follow-ups go out late or vary by collector.
- Controllers who want collections to start from why an invoice is unpaid.
- Finance teams deciding which parts of collections to automate.
See it run in your system
Bring a batch of your real AR — invoices, payments, whatever’s messiest — and we’ll show you exactly how the agents would read, match, and post it back against your own records.