Tracking receivables often starts with a simple file. Invoice number, customer, amount, due date and a “paid” column. Over time it gains formulas that count days overdue, an aging tab and color coding for late invoices. With a few dozen invoices a month, a file like that does its job well.
Where Excel starts to fail
Problems appear when invoices multiply and several people work on the file.
- Payments have to be matched by hand. The bank statement gets pasted into a separate tab and amounts and payment references are matched to invoices, often with a VLOOKUP that can’t cope with one transfer covering three invoices.
- Copies of the file appear. The version on the shared drive, the one from an email and the one called “final_2” all differ, and nobody knows which is current.
- Formulas break. Inserting a row or sorting one column is enough for the aging report to show the wrong amounts.
- Excel won’t send a reminder. Someone has to go through the list, write the messages and remember who got one and when.
- Only one person knows the file. When they are on vacation, reminders stop going out.
Signs it is time for a system
- You keep finding overdue invoices that nobody followed up on.
- You only know where receivables stand after the file is updated, which means once a week or less.
- Your CFO asks for a receivables report, and preparing it takes half a day.
What a collections system takes over
A collections system takes over what is done by hand in Excel. It pulls invoices from your accounting software, matches payments booked in it to invoices and sends reminders according to rules you set once. The team’s time goes to customers who don’t respond or who raise a problem.
In Sunbay a path can include email, a text message, an interest note and a demand letter, and every customer reply is recorded next to the invoice. Aging and DSO are calculated continuously, with no exports. The analytics page shows the reports, and the collections automation page shows how reminders and escalations run.
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