It’s In The Mail: An Accounts Receivable Proof of Concept

by Dylan McMerriman, Accounting ’22 

For my final project I created an accounts receivable automation that would send customized emails to customers based on when their bill was due.  The problem I was trying to solve is that it can be very time consuming to send out personal email reminders to customers on when their payments are due.  Many bigger companies have long accounts receivable list and its important to try and receive as many payments as possible.  Even though some customers don’t always pay. 

I solved this time-consuming issue by creating an automation that could send out emails to customers in seconds.  My automation would grab customer information from pdfs and then store it into excel.  From there it could then organize the information such as customer names, the date their payments are due, how much they owe, and more.  It would calculate a discount for 2/10 net 30 and also an overdue penalty charge. 

From there, it would analyze the information and create a corresponding email based on how many days they had till their payment was due.  For customers that had over 30 days it would send an email reminding them they could take advantage of the discount rate.  For those that had less than 30 days it would remind them of the balance they owe.  For those who missed their payment date it would let them know of the new amount they owe with a penalty for a late payment.

The email could be reviewed before they were sent or just sent right away.  The automation also included an option to send a report to a manager which included the excel file that was created.  The excel file included all the customer information and graphs would be created to show which customers had the largest balance or how many customers were late on payments.  This would allow management to see if there were any customers that the business should stop selling to if they had too large of a balance that they had not paid. 

The resulting automation could organize the customer info and send out emails to as many customers as needed in seconds.