Accounts Receivable Reports AR Leaders Should Track

24 June, 2022
6 min read
Terri Miller, Director of Business Operations
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What you'll learn

  • CFOs and finance managers use accounts receivable reports to track cash flows, working capital management, and productivity
  • There are several types of accounts receivable reports – accounts receivable aging report, DSO reports, customer reports, etc.
  • Automating accounts receivable reporting is more efficient and accurate and enables easy sharing of information
CONTENT
Introduction
Types of accounts receivable reports
Benefits of automating accounts receivable reporting
How to automate accounts receivable reporting?
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Introduction

Business executives rely on a variety of reports to get a complete picture of operations and profitability. Business reports are official documents that represent productivity stats, analysis, key performance metrics, and other related information.

Accounts receivable reports are a type of business report that provides information on outstanding revenue, bad debt, key customer accounts, and other metrics such as days sales outstanding (DSO), collector effectiveness index (CEI), and more.

In this article, we look at the different types of accounts receivable reports and dashboards, their uses, and how to generate them. Choosing an accounts receivable software that supports both out-of-the-box reports and custom reports is crucial to track your cash flow and manage working capital.

Want a template to score accounts receivable software solutions? Check here

Types of accounts receivable reports

Accounts receivable teams use several types of reports to stay abreast of collections, cash flow challenges, and invoice disputes. In this section, we look at some of the commonly used accounts receivable reports.

1. Aging report

Aging reports are the most commonly used accounts receivable reports. Aging reports provide details on how much of your revenue is outstanding and what amounts are due by customers. The report segments outstanding receivables into different aging buckets based on the number of days they have been outstanding (less than 30 days, 30 – 60 days, 61 – 90 days, and more than 90 days).

The AR aging report is useful to identify working capital issues, monitor customer credit quality, and set credit policies.

A business needs to rethink its collections strategy if a large percentage of receivables fall into buckets that indicate accounts outstanding for long periods (e.g. > 60 days). The company needs to rework its credit policy to mitigate risks and improve its collection strategies to achieve timely payments.

Get a free accounts receivable aging report template here

AR Aging Report

Aging report template (Source)

2. Customer Reports

AR teams use a  variety of reports to keep track of critical customer accounts and customer payments. Some types of customer reports in AR management include:

  • Customer list: This report gives complete details about customers including their credit limits, salesperson associated with the account, payment information, currency preferences, geography, discount category, etc.
  • Revenue by customer: This report segments customers by the amount of revenue they generate for your business ( < $1 Mn, $ 1 Mn – $ 5 Mn, etc.) This helps you identify who your top customers are and where you should be offering personalized services vs. custom services
  • Customer transaction report: The customer transaction report provides you an overview of all the interactions with the customer(s) for a given time period. For example, you could use the report to get an overview of all instances where invoices were sent to customers between January 1 – March 31, 2022. You could also look at customer accounts that have overdue receivables, unapplied cash, etc. for the specified time frame 

3. Cash flow forecasting reports

Cash flow forecasting reports help you predict cash flow, revenue reconciliation, and bad debts. It helps you forecast how much you may have to write-off and where you need to increase collection efforts to lower bad debt. Some of these reports may also include annual recurring revenue forecasts and other revenue forecasts.

4. Aged Trial Balance

An aged trial balance lists customers’ account receivable balances over a time period so that you can track what is overdue. It can be printed for any date range and contains columns for credit balances, customer contact details, codes, etc.

Aged Trial Balance

Aged Trial Balance (Source)

5. Customer credit reports

Credit reports provide detailed insights into customers’ creditworthiness. Credit reports generated by AR automation solutions like HighRadius combine data from multiple credit agencies such as D&B, Experian, etc. to provide 360o visibility into your credit risk. The credit reports are auto-updated to reflect the latest news and information about customer accounts. These reports help AR managers make the right decisions on extending credit lines and reduce the business’ credit risk exposure.

6. Transaction reports

Transaction reports provide details into AR tasks carried out during the time period. These reports include error reports, batch listings, journal entries, etc. Transaction reports are a crucial part of your audit trail for accounts receivable transactions.

7. Payment reports

These reports show payment details including paid invoices, open invoices, part payments, payment dates, payment methods used, etc. for each customer. You can use filters on these reports to track payment by currency, date range, invoice number, etc.

8. Cash reconciliation reports

The cash reconciliation report shows a summary of payments received, cash applied, unapplied cash, credit remaining, and refunds. It provides an overview of the financial activity at your business and helps provide a picture of your cash position.

Cash application reports

Cash Reconciliation Reports generated by HighRadius solution

(Representative image – Source)

9. Sales reports

The item sales report helps track revenue, product returns, costs, and profit margins for a given period. This report helps you identify which products have the highest returns or complaints and those that are the most profitable.

10. Productivity reports 

Productivity reports include reports around exception handling productivity, user productivity based on time spent, collection effectiveness index reports, payment committed vs. payment collected by collector, etc. These reports help AR managers gauge the efficiency of their operations and take necessary corrective actions as needed.

Payment committed vs. payment collected report

Payment Committed vs. Payment Collected report in HighRadius

Representative image – Source)

Other AR reports

There are several other accounts receivable reports that AR managers use every day to track the efficiency of their operations. Some of the other AR report types include DSO report, credit applications submitted vs. abandoned, customer classification report based on credit risk, top customers by outstanding amount, P2P forecast reports, certificate expiry reports, customer dispute by reason code report, etc.

Other AR reports

Other reports available in HighRadius solutions (Representative image – Source)

Considering that many types of accounts receivable reports are needed to track cash flows and revenue, it is prudent to automate report generation rather than use manual methods.

Benefits of automating accounts receivable reporting

Accounts receivable reports are used by CFOs and other finance leaders to get quick updates on the business’ cash flows, working capital, and future cash position. AR managers, collection analysts, and credit analysts use AR reports on a routine basis to drive operational excellence and identify AR challenges.

Automatically generating AR reports such as the aging analysis report using AR software is more efficient and reliable than manually creating them using paper and pen or spreadsheets. Auto-generated reports tend to be more accurate and can be shared easily.

Here we look more closely at the benefits of auto-generating accounts receivable reports vs. curating them manually.

  • Provides real-time information: Auto-generated electronic accounts receivable reports are updated in real-time and help provide a single version of the information
  • Quick and efficient: Generating AR reports automatically is less time-consuming and tedious than manually building them using spreadsheets or other BI tools
  • Better control over data sharing: You don’t have to send multiple reports to stakeholders manually or worry about sharing confidential data. AR software helps you set permissions and controls over who can view and share AR data
  • Drill-down capabilities: Electronic versions of the AR reports help users to drill down the data for further analysis and get charts and figures automatically
  • Less error-prone: Manually gathering the relevant AR data, running models on it, and creating dashboards has a higher probability of error than when the software auto-generates reports

How to automate accounts receivable reporting?

According to our survey, 68% of mid-size businesses have either automated or plan to automate their reporting function in 2022.

68% of business will have automated reporting systems by 2022

Source: CFO Survey Results: Priorities and Action Plans 2022

AR software solutions help automate accounts receivable reporting. Our AR automation solutions offer a large number of out-of-the-box reports including credit reports, aged debt report, receipt register portal, and customer reports. Get in touch with our representative to learn more about the out-of-the-box and custom AR reports provided by HighRadius solutions – Autonomous Receivables and RadiusOne.

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