Start with a sample of overdue accounts and record the reason each invoice remains open. Review the balance, customer response, payment history, and next action. This separates problems your team can fix from amounts that are not yet due or require a credit decision.

The following table is a suggested operating framework. Adapt the owners and measures to your business.

1. Make invoices easy to approve and pay

Check the customer's legal entity, agreed amount, purchase order, due date, payment instructions, and billing destination. Send the invoice when the agreed billing event occurs and confirm any required portal submission.

If the same invoice error appears repeatedly, assign the fix to the team that creates or delivers the invoice. Chasing the customer more often will not resolve an invoice that their accounts payable team cannot approve.

2. Align follow-up with the agreed payment terms

Check that the due date in your records matches the agreement. Make sure AR knows about different terms, approved arrangements, and changes agreed by sales.

Set targets that reflect your customer mix and commercial position. Atradius' DSO guidance explains why the right approach depends on the business and its credit terms. Discuss changes for future sales with the relevant commercial owners.

4. Give disputes and handoffs a named owner

For each query, record the amount affected, evidence needed, owner, next action, and response date. Bring in sales or operations when they hold the information required to resolve it.

Credit-IQ's centralized tasks and notes help organize responsibility and preserve account context. Agree who contacts the customer while the issue is investigated and how reminders should be handled during that time.

5. Prioritize accounts that need personal attention

Review overdue amount and age together with the reason for delay. A missing document, repeated broken commitment, and customer cash shortage require different responses.

Use the Credit-IQ AR overview to support a review of outstanding accounts. Decide the next action and review date for each priority account. Where normal follow-up has been exhausted, assess the available route to professional debt collection through Atradius Collections, including the account circumstances and applicable service terms.

6. Review the causes of delay as well as the balance

Hold a weekly review focused on decisions: what is blocking payment, who will act, and when the account will be reviewed again?

Feed recurring issues back to billing, sales, and operations. If several customers reject invoices for the same missing reference, correcting that process is more useful than adding another reminder. Track the operational measures below alongside your consistent DSO calculation.

Use the first month to establish a baseline and test a focused workflow. Use the next two months to review results across payment cycles and expand the changes that work.

The schedule below is a suggested improvement process. It does not predict when a particular DSO reduction will occur.

Track DSO with a small set of operational measures. Each should have a clear definition, matching reporting period, and source.

• DSO: use your agreed receivables-to-credit-sales calculation to track the balance relative to sales.
• Overdue share: divide overdue invoice balances by total open invoice balances on the same reporting date.
• Cash collected from pilot accounts: track customer receipts allocated to the defined pilot invoices in the reporting period.
• Unresolved dispute age: report days since each still-open dispute was recorded, grouped by age band.
• Payment commitments kept: divide commitments paid by their agreed date by commitments due for review in the period.
• Routine follow-up time: record time spent on reminders and handoffs for a defined workload.

Keep zero activity separate from missing information. For example, a payment-commitment rate is unavailable when no commitments fall due for review.

DSO can improve when receivables are written off or sales rise, even without better collections. Review cash received and the movement in receivables before attributing a lower ratio to automation.

AR automation is worth evaluating when recurring reminders consume team time, follow-up is inconsistent, or account context is spread across inboxes. The value to test is a more repeatable process with clearer responsibility and less manual repetition.

Credit-IQ brings reminder workflows, shared tasks and notes, and an AR overview together. It works alongside supported accounting systems. Your finance team still needs to resolve invoice errors, make credit decisions, and manage customer exceptions.

Before choosing a tool, check:

• Accounting fit: review the available integrations for your exact package and edition. Confirm the data covered, update process, and implementation requirements.
• Workflow controls: ask how your team handles an already-paid invoice, a dispute, or an agreed payment arrangement.
• Team responsibilities: test task assignment, account notes, and handoffs using a real example.
• Total cost: review current US plans, invoice limits, and relevant synchronization fees. Debt collection services have separate terms and charges.
• Required scope: include payment processing, cash application, or other functions explicitly if your team needs them. Do not assume every AR tool covers the same work.

For a broader buying evaluation, compare the accounts receivable software options against the bottlenecks identified in your own process.

Use a small test set before applying a workflow more widely. Confirm the outcome in your actual setup, including any manual review needed.

• Already-paid invoice: record a payment in the accounting source, check when the balance updates, and verify that your team prevents an incorrect overdue reminder.
• Partially paid or credited invoice: compare the remaining balance and currency with the proposed message before it is sent.
• Disputed invoice or payment arrangement: assign an owner, record the next review date, and check how communication is controlled while the exception is open.

These are acceptance tests for your process. They do not assume that every connector or workflow automatically pauses, reconciles, or resolves an exception.

See how Credit-IQ can help your team organize reminders, tasks, and overdue account follow-up. Explore a free software trial.

Bring your accounting package and edition, a typical overdue account, and one recurring invoice query. Ask how reminders, tasks, account information, and escalation would work for your team.

Contact Credit-IQ to discuss your AR workflow and request a demonstration focused on those requirements.