Debt Collection - Accounts Receivable Management

The terminology Accounts Receivable Management in debt collection scope refers to the set of policies, procedures, and practices employed by a company with respect to managing sales offered on credit. iMX ensures the end-to-end management of accounts receivable via its integrated “ACCOUNTS RECEIVABLE” module.

The main functionalities of the ACCOUNTS RECEIVABLE module include:

• Logical organization of customer information into cases, which provides a quick overview of the current situation of the customer as well as a detailed review of the history of the relationship with the customer.
• Integration of the invoices issued via a dedicated billing system or generation of invoices via the iMX Invoicing module.
• Automated integration of bank statements, subsequent allocation of payments to customer cases, and matching with the outstanding invoices based on the available payment details.
• Manual allocation of payments to customer cases (e.g. accounts), re-allocation of payments between cases, and splitting payments between several customer cases.
• Management of automated payment methods such as direct debits, recurring credit card payments, and POS payments.
• Integration with online credit card payment providers.
• Automated management of bounced payments – bounced direct debits, bounced credit card payments, etc.
• Reimbursing customers for overpayments.
• Management of disputes – registration, follow-up, and resolution.
• Generation of penalty fees when payments are delayed based on ES rules.
• Management of payment plans – automated follow-up on installment dates, reminders to customers before the next installment, and reminders to users in case of delays of installment payments;
• Calculation of late payment interest.
• Customer scoring and segmentation based on payment behavior and other relevant criteria.
• Creation of manual and automated adjustments to the customer’s balance subject to authorization rules.
• Self-care – provides customers with access to pre-defined information about their cases directly through InternetDB or by interfacing with existing customer portals.
• Dunning strategies – amicable procedures for collection of the receivables, which can start even before the due date and continue until the receivables are collected, or the case is transferred to the legal department. During the dunning process, automated reminders are sent to customers – letters, SMS, emails, phone calls. The frequency and media of the reminders can vary between customer segments and other customer-specific parameters.
• Management of the communication with external collection agencies (incl. bailiffs, lawyers, etc.) – assignment of cases, follow-up on third party costs, registration of payments, etc.
• Multicurrency management.
• Management of internal blacklists – automated registration and de-registration in the blacklist based on the changes to the customer balance; the blacklist status of the customer can be communicated to CRM or billing systems to avoid further relations with blacklisted customers.
• Generation of GL entries for every event (invoices, payments, adjustments, etc.). When a predefined event occurs, iMX handles natively the relevant transaction. Based on the initial settings of the accounts, for which iMX provides a great deal of flexibility, the integrated accounting generator triggers the generation of a dedicated accounting entry. GL entries are included in a verification report which is subject to automatic validation at the end of the day. After the validation, the accounting entry is recorded for auditing purposes in iMX. Afterwards, it is interfaced to the General Ledger. GL entries can be interfaced to the GL system in a detailed or globalized form.
• For audit purposes, iMX provides a direct link between the GL entry and the underlying event/transaction.
• The GL entry schema provides enough flexfields to integrate in them all necessary details about the transactions, which allows for detailed reporting in the GL system.
• Also, iMX provides automated reconciliation of GL transfer accounts according to pre-defined “keys”.

Communication with external accounting systems is a parallel process which is supported natively in iMX. This consists in exporting accounting entry data (or event-based reports) in a file while keeping the flexible structure in order to adapt to technical and functional requirements.