Accounts Receivable Automation

Accounts Receivable Automation

Overview

Accounts receivable (AR) automation converts manual invoice follow-up — sending reminders, tracking payment status, escalating overdue accounts — into a system-driven workflow. In B2B ecommerce, where customers pay on net-30, net-60, or net-90 terms rather than at checkout, AR management directly impacts cash flow and days sales outstanding (DSO).

A well-configured AR system reduces DSO by 5–15 days by ensuring follow-up is timely and persistent, eliminates invoices falling through the cracks, and gives the finance team real-time visibility into what is owed and how overdue each invoice is.

When to Use This Skill

• When your B2B customers pay on credit terms (net-30, net-60, net-90) rather than at checkout
• When your finance team spends more than a few hours per week chasing past-due invoices
• When you have more than 50 active B2B accounts and manual tracking is breaking down
• When you need to enforce credit limits and flag accounts that have exceeded them
• When DSO is higher than industry benchmarks and you need to identify the root cause
• When building a wholesale or distribution ecommerce platform with trade accounts
• When you need audit-ready AR records for lenders or investors

Core Instructions

Step 1: Determine your platform and choose the right AR tool

Step 2: Configure net-terms payment options

Shopify (Standard)

1. For basic net-terms invoicing, install Invoiced from the Shopify App Store 2. In Invoiced: go to Settings → Payment Terms and configure net-30, net-60, net-90 options 3. Assign payment terms per customer in Invoiced → Customers → [Customer] → Payment Terms 4. Connect Invoiced to Shopify: go to Invoiced → Integrations → Shopify and authorize your store 5. When a B2B order is placed, Invoiced automatically creates a corresponding invoice with the correct due date

Shopify Plus (B2B native)

1. Go to Shopify Admin → Customers → Companies and create company profiles for B2B accounts 2. For each company, set Payment Terms (net 7, net 15, net 30, net 60, net 90, or custom) 3. Set a Credit Limit on the company profile to prevent orders beyond the approved amount 4. Orders placed by company buyers automatically generate invoices with the configured payment terms 5. For dunning, install Klaviyo or Invoiced to automate past-due email sequences beyond Shopify's basic reminders

WooCommerce

1. Install the WooCommerce B2B plugin and configure payment terms per customer group 2. Install WooCommerce PDF Invoices & Packing Slips for branded invoice PDFs 3. For dunning automation, install AutomateWoo and configure a workflow:

• Trigger: Order status changed to On Hold (representing unpaid invoices)
• Add timing rules for 1 day, 7 days, 14 days past the due date
• Actions: Send reminder email with payment link

4. Connect to QuickBooks Online via the WooCommerce QuickBooks plugin for AR aging reports

BigCommerce

1. In BigCommerce B2B Edition: go to Company Management → Payment Methods and enable net-terms 2. Set credit limits and payment terms per company in B2B Edition → Companies → [Company] 3. Install Invoiced or NetSuite from the BigCommerce App Marketplace for advanced AR automation 4. Configure automated dunning sequences in your AR tool for 1 day, 7 days, 14 days, and 30 days past due

Custom / Headless

Use Stripe Invoicing to handle the full AR lifecycle without building from scratch:

// Create an invoice for a B2B order using Stripe Invoicing
const invoice = await stripe.invoices.create({
  customer: stripeCustomerId,
  collection_method: 'send_invoice',
  days_until_due: 30, // Net-30 terms
  metadata: { order_id: orderId, po_number: poNumber },
  description: `Invoice for Order ${orderNumber}`,
});

// Add line items
await stripe.invoiceItems.create({
  customer: stripeCustomerId,
  invoice: invoice.id,
  amount: lineTotal, // in cents
  currency: 'usd',
  description: productDescription,
});

// Finalize and send
await stripe.invoices.finalizeInvoice(invoice.id);
await stripe.invoices.sendInvoice(invoice.id);

Stripe automatically handles:

• PDF generation with your branding
• Payment link in the email so customers pay online
• Dunning retries (configure in Stripe Dashboard → Billing → Settings → Invoice reminders)
• Marking invoices as paid when payment arrives

Step 3: Configure dunning sequences

Set up automated reminder emails for overdue invoices. The standard escalation sequence:

Day 0 (due date): Invoice due reminder — "Your invoice is due today" Day 1 overdue: Friendly reminder — "Your payment is a day past due" Day 7 overdue: Second notice — "Invoice still outstanding — please arrange payment" Day 14 overdue: Final notice — "Account review required — please contact us immediately" Day 30 overdue: Credit hold — stop new orders; escalate to account manager or collections

In Invoiced: Configure this under Settings → Chasing → Chasing Schedules. Set a default schedule and assign it to all customers, with a separate more aggressive schedule for high-risk accounts.

In Stripe Invoicing: Configure under Stripe Dashboard → Billing → Settings → Invoice reminders. Enable reminders at due date, 3 days after, 7 days after, and 14 days after.

Step 4: Set up aging reports

Aging reports show outstanding invoices grouped into buckets: current, 1–30 days, 31–60 days, 61–90 days, and 90+ days.

• Invoiced: Built-in aging report under Reports → Accounts Receivable Aging
• QuickBooks Online: Reports → Accounts Receivable Aging Summary or Detail
• Xero: Reports → Aged Receivables
• Stripe: Use Stripe's invoice reporting under Dashboard → Billing → Revenue Recognition or export via the API

Review the aging report weekly. Any account in the 61–90 day bucket should get a phone call, not just an email. Any account in the 90+ day bucket should be on credit hold.

Step 5: Enforce credit limits

Before accepting new orders from a B2B customer on net terms, check that their current AR balance does not exceed their credit limit.

• Shopify Plus B2B: Credit limits are enforced natively — orders over the credit limit are blocked or sent for approval
• Invoiced: Set credit limits per customer under Customer → Credit Limit; Invoiced blocks invoice creation when the limit is exceeded
• WooCommerce B2B: Configure credit limits in the plugin's customer settings; orders over the limit go to pending/on-hold status for review

Best Practices

• Send invoices immediately — do not batch invoices for weekly or monthly sends; each day of delay is a day added to your DSO
• Include a payment link in every invoice — make it a single click for the customer to pay online; friction in the payment process is the enemy of on-time payment
• Separate dunning sequences by customer tier — your treatment of a $500K annual account should be very different from a $5K account; set up separate sequences
• Offer early payment discounts for strategic customers — "2/10 net-30" (2% discount if paid in 10 days) can dramatically reduce DSO
• Set credit holds at 45–60 days overdue, not 90+ — by 90 days, the relationship is already damaged and you have been extending unsecured credit to an uncreditworthy customer
• Reconcile AR daily against payment processor deposits to ensure partial payments are recorded promptly

Common Pitfalls

Related Skills

• @invoice-generation-automation
• @payment-terms-optimization
• @payment-reconciliation-automation
• @stripe-integration
• @tax-compliance-automation

B2B Wholesale Platform: AR Database Schema

Problem/Feature Description

A wholesale distribution company is building a new B2B ecommerce platform that will serve roughly 300 trade accounts, each with custom payment terms ranging from payment on receipt to 90-day net terms. The finance team currently uses spreadsheets to track who owes what and has been losing invoices and missing follow-ups. The CFO has mandated a proper accounts receivable system before the platform goes live.

You are joining as the backend engineer responsible for designing the database layer. The platform runs PostgreSQL. The finance team needs the system to track invoices through their entire lifecycle, store payment records, manage customer credit limits with automatic enforcement, and support escalation workflows for past-due accounts. The aging report is a critical output — the finance team needs to see outstanding balances bucketed by how many days past-due each customer is.

Output Specification

Produce a single SQL migration file named ar_schema.sql that creates all the tables, computed columns, and indexes needed for the AR system. The file should be runnable on a clean PostgreSQL database. Include any seed data needed to configure a default escalation workflow.

Also produce a short schema_notes.md explaining the key design decisions you made — in particular around how computed values are handled and why.

Automated Invoice Follow-Up System

Problem/Feature Description

A B2B software company bills its clients on net-30 and net-60 terms. Historically, a billing admin would manually check a spreadsheet each morning and send follow-up emails to overdue accounts. As the client base has grown to 200 accounts, this process is no longer scalable — invoices are falling through the cracks and the company's average collection time has crept up significantly.

The engineering team needs to automate the follow-up process entirely. The system already has an invoices table and a dunning_sequences table (with a steps JSONB column holding an array of {step_number, days_overdue, action, template_id} objects). The automation should process overdue invoices once per day, advance each invoice through the appropriate escalation step, and when accounts become seriously delinquent, put them on credit hold automatically.

The company also caters to a small number of enterprise clients worth $500K+ annually — the team wants those accounts handled differently from small clients.

Output Specification

Produce a JavaScript module dunning.js that implements the daily dunning processor. The file should be self-contained and use JSDoc comments to document the key functions.

Also produce a dunning_config.json file containing the default dunning sequence configuration that should be seeded into the database.

Include a dunning_notes.md that explains:

• How the system decides which step to execute for a given overdue invoice
• How credit hold escalation is triggered and what it sets on the customer record
• How the system handles high-value vs. standard accounts differently

B2B Payment Processing and Credit Management Service

Problem/Feature Description

A wholesale supplier's finance team records incoming payments manually today — each morning they open bank statements and mark invoices as paid in the system. This causes problems: partially paid invoices sit unrecorded for days, customers on credit hold are unblocked late, and occasionally a payment is applied to an already-voided invoice causing data integrity issues.

The engineering team needs a payment recording service that handles the full lifecycle: recording each incoming payment against an invoice, updating the invoice status correctly (distinguishing partial from full payment), keeping the customer's outstanding AR balance accurate, and automatically releasing credit holds when a customer's overdue invoices are cleared. The service will be called both from the finance team's internal admin panel and by an automated bank reconciliation feed.

Separately, the team also needs the B2B checkout flow to enforce credit limits — orders placed by trade accounts should be blocked if the customer would exceed their approved credit limit.

Output Specification

Produce two JavaScript files:

• payment-recorder.js — the payment recording service
• credit-check.js — a module that checks a customer's credit availability before an order is placed

Also produce a payment_notes.md explaining:

• How the system determines whether an invoice is fully paid vs. partially paid
• How the customer's AR balance is kept consistent with payment activity
• What happens to a customer's credit hold status when their overdue invoice is paid
• What checks are in place to prevent data integrity problems with payment recording