AR and collections
Revenue you have billed is not money until it is collected and applied. This is the workflow for
the gap: seeing who owes what, chasing it in a way that scales, and recording the endings — paid,
credited, or written off — so the ledger tells the truth.
Read the aging first
Aging buckets receivables by how overdue they are. The top view is health; the per-customer views
are the work queue. Before chasing anyone, check for unapplied payments — a customer who shows
delinquent but has cash sitting unapplied is your bookkeeping problem, not their payment problem
(order to cash, step 4).
Dunning
dunning/due is the list of invoices whose next reminder is due — the engine tracks the escalation
sequence per invoice, so running dunning daily sends each customer the right next notice, not a
blast. Every send lands in the collection-activity log automatically.
For the human touches — the phone call, the negotiated plan — record them the same way:
The activity log is what makes collections handoff-safe: the next person (or agent) sees every
notice, call, and promise in one place. An agent doing collections should read the log before
contacting anyone — re-dunning a customer who promised payment yesterday is how you lose them.
The endings
Every open invoice ends one of three ways. Use the right one:
Paid — apply it
Adjusted — credit memo
You agreed the customer owes less: a concession, a billing error found late, returned goods.
Uncollectable — write off
The three endings are not interchangeable, because they say different things about the money: an
application says it arrived, a credit memo says it was never truly owed, a write-off says it was owed
and lost. Using a credit memo to hide a collection failure understates bad debt and flatters revenue
— your auditor will find it, and so will the income statement.A write-off is also reversible (POST /api/v1/ar/write-offs/{id}/reverse) — the customer who
pays after all is a reversal plus an application, with both on the record. The statement
One document with every invoice, payment, credit, and balance — the thing to send when a customer
says “we don’t recognise this charge”, and the fastest way to end a dispute that is really just two
different ledgers.
