Accounts Receivable Management

Account receivables refer to the outstanding invoices or money which is yet to be paid by your customers. Until it is paid, such invoices or money is accounted as accounts receivables. Also known as bills receivables. You need cash all the time to keep your business running smoothly and ensuring the accounts receivables are paid on time is essential to manage cash flow efficiently.

And as the term suggests, management of your accounts receivable is called receivable management. Basically, the entire process of defining the credit policy, setting payment terms, sending payment follow ups and timely collection of the due payments can be defined as receivables management. Management of Receivables is also known as:

• Collection Management
• Payment Collection
• Accounts Receivables

Scope of receivable management

When you do sales on credit, you would certainly need to keep track of the due amounts that your parties owe you. All such dues from your parties will be your outstanding receivables. Managing the outstanding receivables can be critical to your business because it not only helps to understand how much your parties owe you, but also helps you to recover the dues on time and use it for your business, as needed.

• Use credit period
• Record and track dues
• Keep a close eye on long-pending bills
• Payment performance of your customer

Importance & benefits of receivable management

Management of receivables refers to planning and controlling of debt owed to the customer on account of credit sales.  In simple words, the successful closure of your order to sales is determined only when you convert your sales into cash.

Another reason, accounts receivables are one of the key sources of cash inflow and given the volume of credit sales, a large amount of money gets tied-up in accounts receivables. This simply implies that so much of money is not available till it is paid. If these are not managed efficiently, it has a direct impact on the working capital of the business and potentially hampers the growth of the business.

Key areas of accounts receivable management

• Once the decision has been taken to grant credit, then suitable credit terms must be set and the receivables that arise must be monitored efficiently if the costs of giving credit are to be kept under control.
• Before a company grants credit to a customer it should ensure, as far as possible, that the customer is worthy of that credit and that bad debts will not result. Checks should continue to be carried out on existing customers as a company would like to have early warning of any problems which may be developing. This is especially true for key customers of the company.
• A key area of the management of accounts receivable is the final collection of cash from customers. Any company must have a rigorous system to ensure that all customers pay in a timely fashion as, without this, the level of receivables and the cost of financing these receivables will inevitably rise, as will the risk and cost of bad debts.