AR Intelligence—Sales Ledger Analysis

Welcome to this series of instructional articles on BlackLine’s AR Intelligence platform. In this installment, we’ll show you how to raise the bar and empower AR finance teams to unlock their own decision intelligence on a global scale with sales ledger analysis.

This dashboard analyzes the relationship between your volume of customers and the value of debt outstanding, depicting items such as debt by value, count of invoices by value, and count of customers by value. Analysis shows total debt split by overdue and not yet due.

Due to the lack of functionality in ERP solutions, many collections teams have difficulty prioritizing the work of team members and determining which customers should be priority.

Rather than splitting the number of accounts by the number of credit controllers, you can now take a different view of the sales ledger. By looking at the total ledger split by the value bandings, we can see how the team could be better distributed:

• Consider moving more team members to the higher bandings to focus on collecting more of the higher value accounts.

• Make a shift from the traditional distribution of work to focusing on high value accounts.

• Understand the relationship of the smaller value accounts to the total collection total. Consider where the focus for automation should be, so only the exceptions are being handled by members of the team.

The report focuses on where the high proportion or percentage of debt is outstanding and provides the following analysis:

• Overview of debt versus number of customers or invoices by bandings

• View count of invoices and customers within the value bandings

• Ability to split by division and/or business unit

• View by ‘working month’

• In the intel section, you can see the analysis of customers who are yet to make a payment, split by not yet due and overdue

• View analysis by whether the customer has paid previously (through the Cash Application module), has never paid, or a combination of both

One important aspect of this dashboard, like all the other dashboards and reports in the AR Intelligence solution, is the ability to form the high-level analysis into one of the bandings and see a list of the customers.

This could be downloaded and used for a specific collection campaign or sent to a team leader or specific controller for review, consideration, and action.

This report provides AR and credit managers with a new analysis of the outstanding debtor ledger. This will help them understand the relationship between value of debt and number of customers, which then allows a more informed decision about where to focus effort.

Instead of trying to cover every account, as many do, it is easily demonstrated where focus and effort should be applied to achieve the optimum results based on the resources available.

Get your copy of the exclusive white paper New Questions to Gain New Intelligence in Accounts Receivable to discover the questions that can challenge your assumptions and help improve your outcomes, objectives, and critical results.