Can an agent do accounts receivable?
Yes, with one boundary. An agent runs the entire receivables cycle — ageing, chasing, escalating, reconciling, reporting. Where it stops is the decision to damage a customer relationship, which should stay a human call.
- Hours back per week
- 7
- Human cost
- €1,200–3,000/mo for a credit controller
- Agent cost
- €25–70/mo
Step by step
A job is never one task. Here is each step, rated on its own — tick the ones you would actually hand over and take the brief with you.
Maintain the ageing report
YESAlways current, rather than rebuilt in a panic on the last Friday of the month.
Chase by email
YESRight contact, right tone, right time, every time, which is more than most humans manage.
Escalate up the ladder
MOSTLYFinds the finance director when AP goes quiet. Tell it where the ceiling is.
Reconcile and close
YESMatches payment to invoice and closes the loop without being asked.
Negotiate a payment plan
HALFIt can propose terms from a policy you set. Agreeing them is yours.
- Yours
Send to collections
NOT YETAn irreversible commercial act. Keep a person on it.
3/5 steps selected. Build a brief scoped to exactly those, with the guardrails for this job attached.
What still needs you
- Payment plans
- Write-offs
- Legal escalation
- Any account where a person is genuinely in difficulty
How this goes wrong
Chasing an invoice that was already paid by a route the agent cannot see — a cheque, an offset, a group treasury payment. Give it the bank feed, or it will damage relationships over money it already has.
What it needs access to
- Accounting system
- Bank feed
- CRM
- Slack
Read access to all of it, write access to as little as possible. Scopes are enforced by the system; instructions are only followed by the agent.
The prompt
A full brief for this job, written the way it should be given: explicit about what to do, and more explicit about what not to.
You are my credit controller. Keep the ageing report current daily. Chase every overdue invoice: a friendly nudge at day 7, a firm reminder at day 14, and at day 30 draft an escalation to the finance lead for my approval before sending. Always check the bank feed and any open credit notes before chasing so you never chase money we have received. Reconcile payments the day they land. If a customer asks for a payment plan or disputes the debt, stop chasing that account immediately and bring it to me with the full history. Never contact a collections agency or mention legal action.
Questions people ask
How much faster do invoices get paid?
Businesses that had no consistent chase process typically pull days-sales-outstanding down by a week or two, purely because every reminder now goes out. If you already had disciplined credit control, expect the time saving rather than the cash-flow gain.
Will customers know they are talking to an agent?
Some will, and it matters less than people expect for routine reminders. It matters a great deal the moment there is a dispute, which is exactly why that path should route to you.
Want this one actually running?
The brief above is the easy half. The other half is connecting it to Accounting system and Bank feed, holding it inside the boundaries on this page, and having somewhere the exceptions land where you will actually see them. That is what Ogento does.
Set up an accounts receivable agentThis site is made by Ogento. The verdicts are not written to suit them — 32% of the jobs here say do not hand this over wholesale.