Hiring for AR, or expanding the team you already have?
The workload is real and the instinct is right — AR needs more capacity than it has. It's worth knowing where the capacity you already pay for is going before you buy more of it.
The same three things, in every conversation
We've sat down with dozens of businesses running accounts receivable — construction, manufacturing, insurance, professional services. Some with one person on it, some with a small team. Three things come up often enough to stop being anecdotes.
Every time
the same gap, in every conversation
After four or five reminders with no reply, nobody could say what happened next. Not one team had it written down. It's the most consistent thing we've found.
~20
open items, and the review stops
Past roughly twenty things needing a look, reviewing gets deferred — then deferred again. Not a discipline problem. A queue nobody can hold in their head.
“Never got it”
the most common first reply
Usually it isn't true, and it works anyway — answering it properly costs more time than letting it go.
None of those are workload problems in the way a headcount plan assumes. They're the cost of a process that only exists in somebody's memory — and adding a second person to a process that lives in one head gives you two people rebuilding the same context.
The same AR manager, two different weeks
Same person, same customers, same book. The difference is how much of the week goes on rebuilding what already happened.
- Starts the morning working out what changed — who paid, who replied, what was promised last week
- Keeps the follow-up schedule in a calendar reminder, a notebook, or nowhere at all
- Writes the fourth reminder from scratch, guessing at the tone the last one used
- Rebuilds a statement by hand for the customer sitting on nine open invoices
- Holds the promised dates in their head, and finds out too late when one passes
- Chases a customer who already replied, because the reply landed somewhere else
- Stops following up altogether in the weeks when everything else is on fire
- Opens one board: every invoice, the stage it's at, and what happens to it next
- The follow-up schedule lives in the system, not a calendar — written once, and it runs
- Replies arrive sorted by what they mean — dispute, promise to pay, question, already paid
- Responses come drafted, ready to read, adjust and send
- Terms, tone and the things you never say are set once, and every email respects them
- Snoozes an invoice to a promised date and it comes back on its own when the date passes
- Pushes one that's dragged on straight to the stage it deserves, without waiting out the steps
- The sequence keeps running through the busy weeks, all the way to a formal demand letter
Everything on the right is still work the manager owns. Nothing there is a decision taken away from them — it's the same job with the reconstruction removed.
So do you hire?
Sometimes, plainly yes. If the book is full of chronic slow payers, live disputes and payment plans that need negotiating, that's a person's work, and more of it needs more people. Hire, and give them something better to start with than an inbox.
Nearly every business we work with already had someone on AR before they had us. What changed wasn't the size of the team. It was how much of that person's week was still theirs by Wednesday.
Two things worth doing before you decide
Most businesses have never added up what chasing already costs them — the hours going into it now, across everyone who picks it up. That number tends to be the surprise in this whole conversation. Work it out with your own numbers — two fields, no email, and every figure is yours rather than ours.
Then settle what happens to an invoice that has already had five reminders and hasn't moved, because that's the hardest call in the job whoever ends up doing it — and the gap that came up in every one of those conversations. We've set out the path past it separately: what to do when an invoice goes unpaid and nobody replies.
Canadian-built, for Canadian businesses 🇨🇦
Built for how Canadian businesses actually get paid on net-30s that stretch to 75.
Common questions
- So should we hire or not?
- If the overdue book has real judgement in it — chronic slow payers, live disputes, plans to negotiate, relationships worth protecting — hire. Nothing here replaces that. The question is what that person walks into on their first morning, because it decides how much of the week is left for the work you hired them for.
- Is this meant to replace our AR person?
- No. Almost every customer we have runs AR with a dedicated person or a small team, and they still do. What changes is the shape of their week, not whether they're there.
- We're adding a second person to AR. Does this help or get in the way?
- It helps in one specific way: the state of every account sits on a shared board instead of in one person's head, so a second person isn't starting from zero. To be straight with you, we don't do assignment or routing between people yet — that's on the list, not in the product.
- Can a bookkeeper or office manager just absorb it?
- They usually do, which is exactly why it's hard to see what it costs. The work sits on nobody's job description, so it never gets measured and it's the first thing dropped when the month gets busy.
- What happens to the customer relationship?
- Emails send from your own address, in your name, and read like a person wrote them. A reply stops the sequence for that invoice straight away, so nobody gets chased after they've already answered.
- How long does it take to set up?
- Connect QuickBooks Online or Xero and your open invoices come across. Most people are set up the same day.
Give the person you already have the whole picture.
Connect QuickBooks Online or Xero and your AR sits on one board — every invoice, every reply, and what happens next.
Start now for free