As the collection specialist, you are responsible for managing and optimizing the collections process within your organization. Your primary goal is to improve cash flow by efficiently collecting outstanding payments from customers.
The key tasks for a collection specialist are:
- Collection Activities
Identify and follow up on overdue accounts and invoices.
Contact customers via phone, email, or letters to remind them of outstanding payments.
Negotiate payment plans and discounts with customers when necessary.
- Reporting and Analysis
Generate and analyze collections and aging reports.
Provide regular updates on collections status to management.
Identify trends and make recommendations to improve collections processes.
Each one of these key tasks has applications that you, as the collection specialist, can utilize to assist in your daily work.
At the beginning of each day, the specialist should review the collections worklist. The Process Collections Worklist app provides you with a prioritized list of your most urgent customers, for example, those with the highest overdue amounts or those whose amount has been overdue for a very long time. If necessary, you can view the receivables lists of other collection specialists and the list of customers who have not yet been assigned.
With this application you can display and process your own receivables list. This list can be adjusted with additional columns or hiding columns you no longer want to see. These adjustments can be saved in result variants so that you can apply the layout quickly. You can also display a list of customers that you have previously processed.
This application will also assist in managing lists of other receivables. You can display the list of customers that have not yet been assigned or that of a different collection specialist. You can also make the assignment of customers to yourself or other collection specialists that have not yet been assigned.
You can also use Joule to query collection worklist items. It is required that the input must contain the name of the collection specialist. For example, "Show me collection worklist for collection specialist John Doe."
After reviewing the worklist, you start processing the necessary collections using the Process Receivables app. The application provides you with a list of all open receivables that exist about a particular customer. Starting with this list, you can document what further steps you’ve undertaken.
The application is intended for collection specialists whose main task is to contact customers to request payment of overdue receivables. Start the application either directly from the SAP Fiori launchpad, or by drilling down to an individual customer from the Process Collections Worklist app.
This application consolidates data from other applications. You can use this app as the starting point for processing and directly maintaining the related data. You can also access each of the supporting applications directly.
With the Process Receivables app, you can obtain an overview of a customer listing the open receivables, credit memos and contact history. You can further drill down to each document. You can view the head office or branch relationships of the business partner. You can send existing invoices to customers or by accessing related applications, send correspondence such as account statements via email or printed copy. You are also able to display the aging of receivables in a due date grid.
This application can also process the actions that you have undertaken and to document the result. These actions could be creating a Promise to Pay for overdue invoices, creating a dispute case for one or more invoices, create a resubmission for specific invoices or for customers and create notes at the customer level as part of the documentation of any results or discussions.
You can create a Promise to Pay document in the Process Receivables app by selecting the invoice promised on and choosing Create Promise to Pay. This directs you to the Manage Promises to Pay application. You can also directly access the Manage Promises to Pay app. Each promise to pay is assigned to exactly one invoice and only one promise to pay that is not confirmed can exist. It is possible to divide a promise to pay into installments and document that in the Manage Promise to Pay app.
If a promise to pay has the system status of Open or In Process, accounting processes that affect the invoice will be updated in the promise to pay. The system will confirm the promise to pay automatically if the promise to pay is withdrawn, a new promise to pay is issued for the invoice, or the invoice is cleared.
Promise To Pay can be incorporated into the collection strategy as a criterion for creating the collections worklist.
In the Manage Promise to Pay application, you can search and filter existing promises to pay on various criteria, withdraw a promise to pay, show and navigate to linked invoices and other related promises to pay, and add notes and attachments.
After creating a promise to pay, for example, you may want to create a resubmission to determine when the next collections contact would be. This helps make the process efficient by determining that a particular customer does not need to be contacted until a specific date.
You can create a Resubmission event in the Process Receivables app by selected the related invoices and choosing Create Resubmission. This will direct you to the Manage Resubmissions application. From this application you can search and filter existing resubmissions based on various criteria, complete resubmissions, show and navigate to a single resubmission or related journal entries, change the resubmission date, and add notes and attachments.
During the contact with the customer, you may find that the contact person at the customer has changed or additional contacts may be available. You can use the Manage Collection Contact Persons application to maintain this data. You can also search and filter collection contact persons based on various criteria, such as the business partner or collection segment, assign a default contact person for business partners with several that are assigned, and navigate to a single contact person to maintain the data for that contact.
It is important document the information exchanged during a customer contact. The Manage Customer Contacts application will allow you to create information about the contact person at the customer, any objects, such as promise to pay that were created during the contact, adding additional notes and attachments. With this application you can search and filter for customer contacts based on various criteria, such as business partner, collection specialist, or result of the contact. You can also filter for customer contact entries based on status, navigate to a single contact, display object created during the contact, such as promises to pay, resubmissions or dispute cases, display the contact summary, related notes and attachments, and send a recap of the customer contact to the customer via email.
After each contact with the customer, it is important to correspond what was discussed and maybe even promised as part of the discussion. You can use the Manage Collections Emails application to improve the communication with the customer. You can access this application from the Customer Contact screen while entering the customer contact information to complete the process or you can access this directly from the application tile. You have the options to include several types of attachments such as billing documents. You can utilize email templates that been created to get a basic email, but then also adapt the text specific to the customer contact. This application allows you to add Cc and Bcc recipients to make sure all relevant persons are notified, attach any correspondences from financial accounting, attach billing or other relevant documents, and compress the attachments into a .zip file.
The system will generate the email and display the status. The status is Pending as long as the attachments are created in the background. If the process is successful, the status will be Sent. It is possible that the system will return a Failed status. If this is the case, you can edit the email to correct any issues and send it again. It may also be possible that the status is Not Sent to All Recipients. Here the email has been sent to at least one of the recipients, but others may have an invalid email address. You can use the application log via the displayed log number, or you can navigate to the Display Collections Management Log. If either of those activities do not work, you can analyze further with the Monitor Email Transmissions application.
In order to add both the collections and financial correspondence at an attachment, there are some additional settings that need to be configured. We will discuss these in the Configuring SAP Collections Management lesson.
Also in the Process Receivables application, you can display a Risk of Late Payments column. This is a machine learning functionality and needs to be enabled by a machine learning expert. We will discuss this scenario in the Deploying Intelligent Collections Management with Machine Learning, Situation Handling and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) lesson in further detail.
As a collection specialist, you have all the tools needed to keep abreast of the items that need attention, ability to contact the customer and document the results of a customer contact. This helps keep the collections process moving efficiently when working in teams, and to keep a healthy cash flow.