To summarize, all of these strategies fall into the following three buckets:

1. Fixing the root cause of late payments: Delinquent accounts could either be because of the customer in question is not worthy of such credit or simply because the customer was not contacted on time. Addressing customer onboarding and credit review process will take care of the former and addressing the invoicing process, master data correctness and collections bottlenecks will take care of the latter.
2. Eliminating Wastage in A/R Operations: Sometimes, even after all the optimizations within invoicing and collections, organizations don?t have enough resources for collections. Addressing wastage in resource-intensive processes including cash application and deductions will give organizations enough leeway to increase FTEs working on collections while flatlining the A/R team headcount as a whole.
3. Breaking Silos in Operations and Facilitating Collaboration: Collections as a process involves communicating with internal and external stakeholders. Addressing how information flows within the A/R team for example from cash application team to the collections team and collaboration between buyers and suppliers will further unlock opportunities to reduce DSO and improve accounts receivable turnover.

As the success stories show, organizations of all sizes right from Fortune 1000 companies including Dr. Pepper Snapple and Danone and SMEs including Marketo and ShurTech brands have been able to deploy these 10 tactics to collect faster and thereby reduce DSO and past-due A/R.