Accounts Receivable Management Reporting provides important information about the amounts owed to a business by its customers. These accounts receivable reports can help businesses to manage their cash flow, improve collection efforts, and make informed credit decisions. Here are some of the most important accounts receivable reports:
- Accounts Receivable Aging Report: This report shows the age of each invoice in the accounts receivable ledger, usually broken down by 30-day periods. It provides an overview of how long invoices have been outstanding, allowing businesses to identify overdue invoices and take appropriate action to collect payment.
- Invoice Aging Summary: This report summarizes all outstanding invoices by the customer and the aging, typically in 30-day increments. It helps businesses to identify the customers with the largest outstanding balances and past due invoices, which can be used to prioritize collection efforts.
- Customer Account Statements: These reports summarize all transactions, including invoices and payments, for a specific customer. It allows customers to see a breakdown of their account balance and helps businesses to communicate with customers regarding outstanding balances.
- Deduction Management Reporting summarizing the incidence of disputes and deductions by category (trade promotions billback, product shortages, vendor compliance charges, discounts, etc.) and attributable cause ( i.e., Planned, Preventable Error, Customer Error.)
- Cash Receipts Report: This report shows all cash receipts and cash application broken down by date, customer, or payment type. It helps businesses to reconcile their accounts receivable ledger with their bank deposits and identify any discrepancies. Learn more about how to reconcile accounts receivable.
- Sales Analysis Report: This report summarizes sales by product or service, customer, and time period. It helps businesses to identify trends and opportunities for growth and to make informed decisions about their sales strategies.
- Department Performance: This includes comparative personnel performance in maintaining past due AR agings, meeting cash flow goals, number, and quality of collection contacts, etc.
Dashboards
Customizable dashboards can provide at-a-glance answers to important questions like: Where are we now? Where have we been, and where do we want to go? Where should I focus my time today?
They include critical metrics like aging, days sales outstanding (DSO), open AR, collections effectiveness, cash forecasting from accounts receivables, and days deduction outstanding (DDO).
Accounts receivable software should enable actionable AR reporting to position the AR department more strategically in your company. At the most basic level, reporting can drive credit, collection, and deduction management insights to help you make better decisions and become more efficient. At the highest level, reporting can deliver insights into customer profitability, cash flow, and industry trends that better support the CFO’s mission, as well as the sales department.
Each company is different, so your accounts receivable software must be the right fit and provide flexible AR reporting options that help your operations grow and improve. Reporting features must also be simple to use for all team members.
When evaluating AR software platforms, include a review of reporting capabilities to understand the insights that the software can bring as well as ease of use.
Common Questions
As an accounts receivable professional, chances are you have wished you could answer these questions.
- Can I have a report on deduction resolution to help identify customer problem areas to see where we should focus?
- How are deductions resolved, and what are our top types of deductions by customer?
- What are our collections and deductions analysts working on? Are they focused on what is most important to our business?
- How do our aging trends look over the past year? Are there divisions or customers that pose the greatest challenges for us?
- Can we forecast our cash using customer payment histories?
Legacy and ERP Systems
Legacy and ERP Systems are hard to use, require IT involvement, and often lack the level of granularity of reporting needed. Your next recourse might be a business intelligence tool to extract data from your present system, but using those tools becomes a project of its own and will require IT support. BI tools work, but there are some negatives to consider. BI tools are costly and usually require set up by experts, need IT involvement or other data analysts to build or update reports.
A better option is to get the information you need from a modern accounts receivable software system. These systems can run reports that provide real-time information delivered to the right stakeholders or escalate them as the case may be.
Pre-configured and Configurable reports
In an advanced AR system, both pre-configured and on-the-fly configured reports are serious benefits, as they make customization easier and provide flexibility so anyone can use them so you can make timely and accurate decisions.
- Highlight areas of concern.
- Identify trends and root causes.
- Get to the root of very specific challenges.
- Provide an audit trail that can determine the true cost of your customer relationships.
- Establish G/L reserves or trade promotion fund updates for items such as cash discounts, returns, pricing errors, post audits, and bad debts.
Real-time information can be extracted instantly in detail so that it can be escalated to key stakeholders for action. With a few clicks, you can make new reports that work for your organization, or you can take a standard report and quickly configure it to your organization’s needs.
A case example for deductions or claims. Reports can help recover cash from invalid deductions by prioritizing deductions by type and age and clarifying responsible departments—credit, sales, accounting, or operations. And most importantly, reports can prioritize those invalid deductions that are available for action and recovery.
For deduction management, these insights enable you to track how deductions are ultimately resolved (approved, credited, written off, or repaid.) You can monitor ROI and receivables productivity and address sources of continuous profit leakage, which is always important, but especially if deduction management is offshored.
Information without IT
New report-generation technology enables you to adapt to changes and get the insights you need easily. You don’t need IT assistance or third-party tools to get this data, which saves time and money.
You can quickly create new or updated reports with detailed and summary information that drives better decision-making. And you can share the reports with other users in minutes.
Measuring Cash Flow and Accounts Receivable Goals
Carixa’s reporting platform brings significant flexibility and simplicity. We are committed to your program’s resilience and help you constantly improve. Measurement is the key to improvement, so through better reporting, we help you measure the goals you create and change the reporting as needed.
And through report-sharing capabilities, you now have the means of involving key stakeholders in your goals, so they can understand them and work alongside you.
Sophisticated reporting working with intelligent automation and workflows positions accounts receivable more strategically in your company. To optimize your AR processes, you must be able to leverage data and analytics. The right reports unlock the strategic value of data and enable you to be a finance leader in your company.
Don’t skip the following when reviewing different software platforms.
