Ask the finance lead at a mid-sized company how they keep track of payments, and the answer usually sounds like this. The accounting system issues the invoices and the bank shows incoming payments, yet every week someone exports the overdue list to a spreadsheet, checks who has paid and writes the reminders. Some balances still need fixing by hand because a customer paid two invoices in one transfer or quoted the wrong invoice number.
The tools exist, but nobody connects them into a process
Each of these tools does its own job well. The accounting system knows how much a customer owes, but not what the account manager agreed on with them over the phone. The bank shows the payment, but it won’t close the case in the spreadsheet or stop the next reminder. People fill the gap by copying data, comparing lists and remembering who needs a follow-up.
With a few dozen invoices a month, one person can keep every customer and their habits in mind. With a few hundred, invoices start to slip through, and answering the question of who owes what takes an hour with a spreadsheet.
Manual work costs more than the budget shows
Chasing payments rarely has its own line in the budget, so it is easy to overlook. Its cost shows up in three places.
- Team time. Reminders, calls and payment matching take hours that an accountant or controller could spend on analysis and the month-end close.
- Mistakes. A reminder goes to a customer who has already paid, while another invoice gets no reminder at all because it dropped off the spreadsheet.
- Cash tied up in receivables. The later someone notices a delay, the later the customer pays, and money the company has already earned sits in someone else’s account.
We break these costs down in more detail in our post on what manual receivables really cost.
Why companies put off automation
When we talk to finance teams, three reasons come up most often. Large ERP systems have collections modules, but rolling them out can be expensive and slow, which is too much for a company that only wants its reminders in order. No-code tools let you build your own automations, but someone has to maintain and fix them every time the process changes. The third reason is the simplest. As long as the manual process more or less works, nobody has time to change it, so the spreadsheet grows more columns and the calendar more reminders.
What you can automate today
Most accounting systems share their data through APIs, so reminders no longer have to depend on a spreadsheet and one person’s memory. In receivables, automation now covers several things.
- Pulling open invoices, due dates and contact details from the accounting system.
- Email and text reminders before and after the due date, in the order your team sets.
- Matching payments booked in your accounting system to invoices, so reminders stop once the customer pays.
- Interest notes and demand letters at later stages.
- A task for a specific person when a customer raises a dispute or asks to pay in installments.
Your team still handles the cases that need judgment, a conversation or a decision. Automation takes over the steps that look the same every time.
Where to start
Start by checking two numbers. The first is how many hours a week your team spends on reminders and payment matching, and the second is how many invoices are overdue today. That is enough to see the size of the problem. If your reminders run from a spreadsheet, also read why collections in Excel break as you grow.
Sunbay connects to your accounting system and CRM, sends reminders, runs escalations and issues interest notes according to the rules you set. Cases that need judgment or a decision go to the finance team as tasks. You can see how it works on the collections automation page.
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