When Cash Is King—An Accounts Receivables App Accommodating Different Use Situations

Abstract

Today’s economic environment has accelerated an already changing working context for accounting. Collecting accounts receivables (AR) stands out, as it enables companies to turn invoices into cash. The objective of this article is to elaborate on both the most important use situations for an AR collection management and a subsequent app design accommodating these use situations. We take a healthcare product provider as our reference company and come up with nine use situations prioritized by an analytic hierarchy process as follows: (1) drive operational governance, (2) switch to a more proactive collection management, (3) increase order-to-cash process effectiveness, (4) set targets and monitor them, (5) automate AR process actions by an agent, (6) predict process errors in advance, (7) exchange information across departments, (8) set up a predictive liquidity management, and (9) automate workload tracking of AR process activities.