Accounts receivable automation
Automating the invoice was never the bottleneck.
| Charge | Count | Value | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| Individual annual duesDUES.ANNUAL | 4,927 | $7.51M | Issued |
| Corporate membershipsDUES.CORP | 41 | $812,000 | Issued |
| Chapter feesFEE.CHAPTER | 386 | $96,000 | Issued |
| Held — dispute openHOLD.DISPUTE | 6 | $144,000 | Held |
| Skipped — waived by committeeSKIP.WAIVED | 14 | $336,000 | Skipped |
| Skipped — no contact on fileSKIP.NOCONTACT | 11 | $264,000 | Needs attention |
| Issued | $8.42M |
The bottleneck
Faster invoices, same backlog.
Ask a receivables team where the week goes and almost nobody says raising invoices. They say working out who actually paid, chasing people who turn out to have paid already, and reconciling three systems that disagree about the same account.
Most AR automation addresses the first activity and leaves the other two. That produces a real improvement of a small problem, and the team keeps the spreadsheet.
Automating one stage of a cycle moves work to the stage on either side of it. The gains come from holding the whole loop on one model — which is why a payment applied in one place should take somebody off a worklist somewhere else, with no integration in between.
A collections tool bolted onto a billing tool still needs a person reconciling in the middle. That person is the cost.
The cycle
Eight stages, one financial model.
- 01ObligationSomeone is expected to pay something, for a reason, by a date.
- 02BillAn invoice, statement or notice is raised from the obligation.
- 03CollectMoney arrives — on whichever rail the payer actually uses.
- 04ReconcileEach payment is matched to the obligation it settles, or flagged.
- 05ActStanding updates, access follows, and what is left becomes work.
Obligations
What is owed exists because of a relationship and a rule, not because a document was generated. Nothing has to be invoiced for the organization to know what it is due.
See how it worksBilling
Recurring and one-off charges, schedules, proration, credits and penalties — with the run reporting what it could not bill and why, rather than silently skipping it.
See how it worksCollection
Money arrives on whichever rails your payers actually use. All of them land in one financial model rather than in one integration each.
See how it worksCash application
Receipts applied to the open items they settle, with everything that will not apply held visibly rather than guessed at.
See how it worksAging
What is outstanding, by how long, excluding accounts whose money is sitting in review. An aging report that counts those is wrong in the expensive direction.
See how it worksCollections
Worklists ranked on what is recoverable, promises to pay, arrangements, disputes and escalation — with every conversation attached to the account it was about.
See how it worksStanding & entitlements
What a balance means for this relationship, and what it grants or withdraws. The step almost nothing automates, and the one customers actually feel.
See how it worksReporting
Expected, received, applied, outstanding — and what changed today. Reconciled figures rather than a dashboard built on the same unapplied cash.
See how it worksAging that is true
Most aging reports overstate what is collectible.
An aging bucket is only as honest as the cash application behind it. Every receipt that arrived and was never applied appears in that report as an unpaid balance, and every one of those is a customer about to be contacted about money they sent.
Because Zetu owns the reconciliation the aging is derived from, an account with a payment in review, a kept arrangement or an open dispute drops out of the worklist without anybody remembering to remove it.
Collections
A worklist ranked on what is recoverable.
Promises to pay, arrangements, disputes, assignment and escalation, with a record of every conversation attached to the account it concerned — and an explicit notion of when not to chase.
| Select | Account | Days past due | Balance | Next action | Row actions |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cedar House PartnersCorporateacc-1184 | 8 | $420 | Reminder queued | ||
| Priya RamanIndividualacc-2291 | 31 | $240 | Hold — payment in review | ||
| Solstice Studio LtdCorporateacc-3307 | 62 | $2,140 | Promise due today | ||
| Mary KamauIndividualacc-4416 | 127 | $370 | Escalate to committee |
- Priya Raman — An unreferenced mobile money payment of $240 is a 95% match for this account. Chasing her would be wrong.
- Solstice Studio Ltd — Promised $600 by 24 August. Kept 2 of 3 previous promises.
The categories
What each kind of tool is genuinely good at — and where it stops.
| Category | What it is genuinely good at | Where it stops | What Zetu adds |
|---|---|---|---|
| Subscription billing platforms | Excellent at plan-and-card revenue: pricing models, upgrades, dunning against a stored card. | Assume the rail carries the payer's identity. Money arriving by transfer or wallet with a free-text reference has nowhere to go. | Built for the case where identifying the payer is the job, not a populated field. |
| Accounting systems | The authoritative record of what happened, and the right place for it. | Designed to record history, not to operate a relationship. They will hold the arrears; they will not work them. | Sits upstream and posts reconciled entries onward, so the ledger receives work already done. |
| Collections and dunning tools | Strong sequencing, escalation and outreach once you know who owes what. | Inherit whatever the upstream system believes. Applied to unreconciled balances they chase people who have paid. | Owns the reconciliation the worklist is derived from, so the list excludes accounts with money in review. |
| Cash application point tools | Genuinely good at matching remittance to open items at volume. | One stage of the cycle. The obligations upstream and the standing downstream stay somebody else's problem. | Holds the whole loop on one model, which is why a match changes a worklist without an integration. |
Zetu does not need to be the right tool for every organization. Why Zetu sets out the same argument at length, including the cases where a different category fits you better.
The platform
Eleven capabilities on one model.
Questions
AR automation, answered plainly
What does accounts receivable automation actually automate?
In most products, the sending: invoices go out on a schedule and reminders follow them. That is the part that was never especially hard. The manual work in a receivables function is concentrated after the money arrives — identifying the payer, applying the cash, deciding what is genuinely outstanding and working it. Automating the sending and leaving the rest produces a faster version of the same backlog.
Is Zetu an AR automation tool?
It covers the cycle an AR team runs, so the term fits. But the emphasis is different from most of the category: Zetu begins at the obligation rather than the invoice, and treats reconciliation as the centre of the product rather than a report at the end of it. If your receivables are card subscriptions with sophisticated usage pricing, a subscription billing platform will serve you better and we would rather say so now than in the sixth conversation.
How is this different from just using our accounting system?
An accounting system is the record of what happened. Receivables is the operation that decides what happens: who to contact, whether they actually owe it, what arrangement is in place, what access their standing should grant. Both are necessary. Asking the ledger to run the operation is what produces the spreadsheet that everyone actually works from.
Do we replace our billing system?
Not necessarily. Zetu can hold obligations and billing itself, or take billed items from an existing system and own everything downstream of them. The second is common where a billing platform fits the pricing model well and falls apart at reconciliation.
What size of organization is this for?
The shape matters more than the size: recurring money owed by people you have an ongoing relationship with, arriving on rails that do not identify them cleanly. That describes a five-hundred-member association and a fifty-thousand-account utility equally well, and describes a business with ten enterprise invoices a year not at all.
How long does implementation take?
It depends almost entirely on the state of what is being migrated. Moving a clean spreadsheet of current balances is a different exercise from reconstructing three years of arrears, arrangements and disputes across two former systems. We would rather scope it after seeing the data than quote a number that changes.
Related
- Payment reconciliation softwareThe stage where the manual week actually goes.
- Cash application softwareApplying receipts to open items, in finance's own vocabulary.
- Recurring billing vs recurring receivablesWhy the two are not the same category, and what falls between them.
- Why collection workflows need more than remindersSequencing is not a collections strategy.
Bring us one messy month.
Bring one month of obligations and one month of payments. We will show you what reconciles, what does not, and what that is costing you.