Top 5 Benefits of Hiring Accounts Receivable Specialists

Image Sourece: Freepik

One of the most important aspects of profitable businesses is a steady revenue stream backed by efficient payment processes and effective customer service. Businesses struggle to manage these aspects due to a shortage of skilled finance and accounting experts or high turnover creating bottlenecks in their financial processes. How do you turn this around? Hire accounts receivable specialists who are on top of their game. Let’s dive into the ways businesses bleed revenue and how accounts receivable specialists remedy that.

What does an Accounts Receivable Specialist do?

An accounts receivable specialist manages your company’s outstanding invoices and ensures timely customer payments to maintain a steady cash flow.

They follow up with customers on purchases made for goods and services and generate invoices to notify customers of pending payments.

Since most businesses offer credit options for their customers, accounts receivable specialists create financial stability by tracking outstanding payments, transaction records, and credit limits for customers.

Sounds cut and dry, right? Why would these processes cause issues significant enough to hire an accounts receivable specialist?  There are minute and analytical processes involved in keeping a business financially healthy, and here is how accounts receivable staff ensure it.

Benefits of Accounts Receivable Specialists

1 – Ensuring Accuracy

Most companies rely on a single expert, like an accountant, to handle all financial aspects, which is the first mistake. A qualified accountant, while brilliant at their job, cannot wear multiple hats and switch them around without making too many costly mistakes, like invoice errors, which contribute to about 61% of late payments for businesses.

Hiring an accounts receivable specialist ensures they conduct due diligence in every transaction, collaborate with bookkeepers, and use tools to check and generate accurate invoices to reduce errors and payment delays. One of the benefits of accounts receivable staff is, the more effort they put in, the more precise payment cycles can be. The result? You get paid on time; your cash flow is regular.

2 – Increasing Efficiency

Just as falling behind on bills creates a hole in your finances, a business suffers greatly by falling behind on its accounts receivable. An inexperienced accounting team or unskilled accounts receivable processes can cause significant damage to your bottom line. A survey conducted by VersaPay revealed that nearly 2 in 5 CFOs, almost 39%, reported their accounts receivable teams are weeks or months behind and won’t catch up on their invoices.

A business is profitable when its financial gear is greased, and it can grow at a brisk pace—that’s only possible when you hire accounts receivable specialists to create clear procedures for invoice creation, distribution, and follow-up. They can implement regular reporting and analysis in collaboration with financial analysts to identify outstanding invoices and recover your payments efficiently. What happens then? Your revenue stream runs like a tight train schedule.

Image Sourece: Freepik

3 – Promoting Strategic Thinking

Without accounts receivable specialists, it is challenging for businesses to get a hold of their customer payment patterns and understand common issues. But there is so much more than sending invoices and making follow-up calls. Accounts receivable is a progress board showing how well your business functions and how many ways it generates profits. If your employees are using these insights to create a game plan for further growth, they are not the right fit.

Hire accounts receivable specialists with diverse experience, upgraded skills, and industry knowledge to create financial strategies for you. They can utilize accounting software and analytics and generate timely financial reports to identify credit risks and devise flexible payment methods to balance customer satisfaction. Their industry knowledge of debt collection helps you drive up your revenue growth.

4 – Fostering Collaboration

One of the most pressing issues faced by companies is their departments, and especially financial teams working in silos. One department handles the payroll, other tackles vendors, and a third recovers payments. However, this approach has been counterproductive, and the result is a fragmented system where invoices get lost, misprocessed, and eventually cause payment delays and revenue loss. The source below is from the same VersaPay survey that asked accounts receivable teams what can boost their productivity and reduce risks.

Image Sourece: VersaPay

This issue highlights a pitfall for hiring managers who focus more on technical skills and ignore the Top Interview Questions for Accounts Receivable Specialists when they hire accounts receivable specialists to ensure they are a cultural fit and have collaborative abilities to maximize productivity. The benefit of accounts receivable staff is collaboration with other stakeholders, such as accounts payable specialists and internal accountants, to organize financial processes and reduce risks. The outcome — a tight, productive team delivering revenue growth.

5- Building Customer Relationships

Lastly, customers are the pivot to your entire enterprise. Winning your customer’s approval and loyalty is a sure way to cement a positive market reputation and profitability. But what does your finance team have to do with this? Despite their heavy workloads, your accounts team communicates with customers, including accounts receivable specialists, to recover outstanding payments, follow up on invoices, and do outreach. If they’re untactful, aggressive, non-persuasive, or unaccommodating, your customers will move on after one bad experience, increasing your bad debt and delinquency. Over three-quarters of finance and business leaders agree that finance teams must build stronger customer relationships.

Hire accounts receivable specialists with sufficient industry knowledge and technical skills to identify common delinquency patterns in your business. They should be able to use that information to conduct personalized outreach with customers, listen to their specific concerns, and devise flexible payment options to ensure timely payments. Skilled accounts receivable specialists go a step further and sustain long-lasting relationships with customers by providing incentives and discounts for timely payments and resolving disputes proactively to foster customer loyalty.

How to Hire Accounts Receivable Specialists

Now you know the 5 top benefits of accounts receivable staff but hiring them is another story.

With Remote Scouts, your hiring struggles become easier, thanks to our 13 years of staffing experience and Employer of Record services. We understand that hiring skilled accounts receivable specialists is time-consuming, costly, and taxing when you are fighting over a limited talent pool and trying to beat out your competition to acquire the top candidate. That’s why we take the hassle off your hands and hire for you. Give it a whirl!

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