Top Accounts Receivable Reports Your Company Should Be Analyzing
February 15, 2023
Today’s intelligent automation systems enable sophisticated reporting that can position the accounts receivable department more strategically in your company. At the most basic level, consistent reporting can drive insights to help you make better decisions and become more efficient. At the highest level, it can help you to be a finance leader in your company.
Each organization is different, so your accounts receivable system must be the right fit and provide reporting options that help your program grow and improve. Reporting features also must be simple to use for all team members.
When evaluating software platforms, start by reviewing reporting capabilities to understand the insights that the platform can bring as well as how easy it is to use.
Answering Common Reporting Questions
As an accounts receivable professional, chances are you have gotten many reporting requests such as:
- Can you get me a report on deduction resolution trends to help identify areas of concern and see where we need to focus our efforts of revenue recovery?
- Can you tell me how your deductions are resolved? What are our top types of deductions?
- 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, customer types or times of year that pose the greatest challenges for us?
- Can we forecast our cash from current receivables, adjusted for actual past pay behavior?
The process for getting the requested information may feel like navigating a maze. It’s hard to know where to find the data, since there may be multiple sources.
It is also challenging to produce the data from an ERP system that is very rigid and expensive to change. Also, many ERP systems lack the level of granularity needed in the accounts receivables process, so extracting data is difficult or impossible.
Your next recourse might be a business intelligence tool, but reporting from those tools becomes a project of its own.
Pros and Cons of Business Intelligence tools
BI tools are very flexible, getting you to the output you need. Depending on the tool, you can get pixel-perfect visuals. However, there are some negatives to consider. Often multiple steps involve moving data around. Specific skill sets are needed, so many users can’t build reports. Many BI tools require IT or other data analytics teams to build or update reports, resulting in slow progress towards serving your team needs. Licensing the tool carries additional costs, and you need additional resources to support it.
A better option is to get the information you need from an accounts receivable automation system. These systems can run reports that provide real-time information delivered to the right stakeholders or escalating them as the case may be.
Important Reporting Features of Receivables Software
Configurable reports
Configurable reports are the main benefit of advanced automation systems, as they make mass customization easier and provide flexibility to the department. Management can use this information to make timely and accurate decisions.
Reports can:
- Highlight areas of concern
- Identify trends and root causes
- Solve very specific challenges
- Provide an audit trail that can determine the true cost of your business
- Establish G/L reserves or trade promotion fund updates for items such as cash discounts, returns, pricing errors, post audits and bad debts
This real-time information can be extracted quickly and in summary form so that it can be auto-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. Those same reports can also make it clear which department or personnel is required to resolve the deduction—credit, sales, accounting or operations.
And most importantly, reports can prioritize those invalid deductions that are available for action and recovery
In the area of deductions, these insights enable you to track how deductions are ultimately resolved (approved, credited, written off or repaid.) You can monitor ROI and receivables productivity as well as address sources of continuous waste, which is especially important if deduction management is outsourced.
Standard reports
Standard reports are template reports based on best practices. A wide array of your accounts receivable data is encompassed in these foundational reports. These tend to be ready to go on any leading receivables platform at no additional cost.
Some of the most important reports you can expect to see are:
Dashboards
Customizable and intuitive 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).
Information without IT Involvement
New report-generation technology enables you to easily adapt to changes and get the insights you need. You don’t need IT assistance or third-party tools to get this data, which saves time, money and valuable resources.
You can quickly create new or updated reports with detail and summary information that drives better decision-making. And you can share the reports with other users in minutes..
Measuring Progress on Goals
Carixa’s reporting platform brings significant flexibility and simplicity. We are committed to your program’s resilience and helping 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 in tandem 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 this evaluation when reviewing different software platforms.
