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Table of Contents

• 1. What is Accounts Receivable Software?
• 2. The benefits of Accounts Receivable Software
• 3. Typical features of Accounts Receivable Software
• 4. The cost of Accounts Receivable Software
• 5. Considerations when purchasing Accounts Receivable Software
• 6. Relevant Accounts Receivable Software trends

What is Accounts Receivable Software?

Accounts Receivable Software deals with money owed to an organization and automates the recording of payments on outstanding invoices. The solution helps professionals in managing their cash flow cycle by providing reports on collection, aging, and generating monthly customer statements and collection letters.

The benefits of Accounts Receivable Software

• Providing a better visual of the cash position of your organization: With the accounts receivable software in place, organizations can automate their cash collection process that helps in minimizing any delay in payments. The software helps to identify invoices, set reminders for customers to pay on time, and forecasts cash payment from customers based on their payment history. All of this leads to having a better picture of where an organization stands financially.
• The availability of detailed information keeps everyone on the same page: Accounts receivable software can help in automating the entire payment cycle and provides you with information such as post-sales data and documents related to certain deals. It helps in real-time reporting with which users can access the same information. It also helps to resolve all invoice-related issues.
• Automated payments prevent users from manual labor: With an accounts receivable solution, it becomes easy for businesses to store all records digitally. This way, no one has to dig around to find the list of due payments. The solution facilitates faster payment and reconciliation with functionality for autopay, discount management, and automated reminders. Automation of repetitive tasks such as sending out email reminders and account statements makes things a lot easier for accounting professionals.
• Better customer communication and collaboration: Accounts receivable software make it easier for you to communicate with customers. You can review account information, create emails, attach invoices, create mail merge documents, and log phone calls all from one screen. The solution helps you serve your customers through communication tools embedded in the software itself.

Additionally, the solution automates invoice delivery to customers, alerts you to problems with invoices, and provides all details and information in a centralized location so you can serve your customers more efficiently.

Typical features of Accounts Receivable Software

• Billing and invoicing: Create and manage monetary interactions between parties (i.e., bills and invoices).
• Customer statements: Allow customers to view their invoices, payments, and the balance on their account.
• Receivables ledger: Provide a list of customers and payments due, which is updated monthly.
• ACH payment processing: Receive credits and send direct debits through automated clearing house (ACH) electronic network.
• Aging tracking: Pull a report on unpaid invoices that shows how much time has elapsed since the due date of the invoice.
• Check processing: Receive and deposit or issue and record check payments.
• Online payment processing: Accept and process customer payments from an online portal such as your website, mobile application, or email.

The cost of Accounts receivable software

Most accounts receivable software products are priced on a “per month” basis and can be divided into three pricing tiers based on their starting price.

Price ranges*:

• $10 - $15
• $15 - $32
• $32+

*The pricing included is for the entry-level/lowest-priced offerings found on vendor websites on November 25, 2019. These ranges correspond to the 25th, 75th, and 100th percentile of the pricing information gathered from the vendor websites of sample products.

The above list summarizes pricing for the base plans of most products. An enterprise or professional product, which is priced higher, may include additional features such as custom automation rules, customer success manager, advanced reporting, and scaled data storage.

Considerations when purchasing accounts receivable software

• Centralized system: There can be a variety of other systems that accounts receivable software tools might need to access. For instance, an accounts receivable tool might need to access an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for invoice information, a customer relationship management (CRM) system for client information, or send emails. With that in mind, it becomes vital to invest in a centralized system that enables you to have accessibility to invoices, disputes, call logs, and emails in one place.
• Integration capabilities: The accounts receivable software needs the ability to interact with other existing systems such as an ERP software, accounting, supply chain management, a CRM system, as well as the banks that are involved in the payment process. Integrating with such solutions will save you from reconciling the entries to each of the aforementioned systems manually. Therefore, make sure to look into solutions that will be able to easily sync or import/export data to and from existing systems, which will save you from a lot of manual work.
• Specialized accounts receivable applications should be considered: There is a plethora of accounts receivable applications, loaded with a vast array of features that are available in the market. It is necessary to know exactly what your business needs within a new system. For instance, transportation and logistics businesses mostly need to manage disputes related to freight invoices while professional service firms need invoices related to timesheets, bills of lading, and proof of delivery. Therefore, it is recommended that while evaluating these applications, you should go for a specialized accounts receivable application that suits industry-specific requirements.

Relevant Accounts Receivable Software trends

• Predictive cash forecasting will give visibility into working capital: Calculating each payment that you need to collect can be time-consuming and can cause errors as well. Using an algorithm for predictive cash forecasting, one can determine how much cash will be coming in based on historical payment patterns. It will show which customers are most likely to pay and by when, which will provide insights into your working capital and can help in making better decisions for the business.
• Personalized customer communication is building stronger business relationships: Standardization in customer communication can wreak havoc to your customer relationships. This is especially true when it comes to collecting overdue payments from customers, which can be considered an intrusion into private space if done improperly. This is the phase in which businesses have the chance to show that they care about their customers. Using personalized communication solutions that are entirely tailored to customer preferences and needs, companies will help users maintain a stronger, long-term business relationship with their customers.