Niche Distribution Recovery: From A/R Leakage to Automated Collections
A Southeast-based industrial parts distributor had $127K in accounts receivable aged beyond 60 days. Collections follow-up was informal: the office manager chased invoices when cash got tight, but there was no systematic process. Payment terms were quietly extended over email without ever touching QuickBooks. The new owner could not distinguish between customers who needed a nudge and customers who had been granted unwritten extensions.
We ran a 30-day sprint. Week one mapped the real collections workflow: who approved exceptions, which customers had unwritten terms, and where the follow-up breakdowns happened. Week two documented the decision rules and built the Operating Graph for the A/R process. Week three deployed an Agentic CFO layer over QuickBooks to monitor aging, draft contextual invoice chases, and queue them for human approval before sending.
A/R aging dropped by 40% in the first 60 days. The owner recovered $127K in past-due invoices without damaging customer relationships.
The distributor now operates from a codified collections protocol. Exception rules are documented in the Operating Graph. The Agentic CFO drafts follow-ups every Monday, surfacing only the invoices that require action. The owner reviews and approves in a single queue. What used to be a weekly scramble is now a 10-minute workflow.
“We were chasing invoices with sticky notes and memory. Now we have a system that tells us exactly who to call and why.”
Principal, Southeast Independent SponsorKey Metrics
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