Advanced Collections

- An Accounts Receivables Feature

- By Chirag Lalwani

Introduction
Organizations are under immense pressure to collect more while reducing their cost to collect, and need to efficiently manage collections processes in todays complex economies, growing businesses, and increased globalization. Advanced Collections supports a number of innovative processes and concepts that are different from traditional collections practices.

Pain Areas
Identifying delinquent customers and transactions accurately, consistently and timely becomes difficult when transactions are voluminous. The time spent by collectors on performing manual, time - consuming tasks related to collection is quite un-reasonable when compared to output. Proper tracking of disputed transactions becomes difficult when transactions are voluminous. Identifying customers who have large payments coming up and have habitually paid late i.e. Knowing which customers need more attention than others. Manual tracking of the follow ups to be taken with the customers becomes cumbersome. Timely tracking of the promises given by customers. Treating different delinquent customers differently depending on various factors.

Solutions
Tasks
Promise & Broken Promise Disputed Transactions

Dunning Letters
Aging Notes Universal Work Queue (UWQ)

Tasks
Collector can create tasks in the collections workbench to properly track the follow ups he needs to perform. Tasks tab Displays all open tasks related to the customer selected in the Collections Header. These tasks can be scheduled, planned or performed. Collector need not open each and every customer in the collections workbench, collector can view all the tasks he needs to perform from Universal Work Queue (UWQ) and accordingly take the action and update the task. Different Statuses can be attached to Task to show the stage of task.

Tasks (Screen-shot)

Promises & Broken Promises

Oracle Advanced Collections Provides the flexibility to enter the details of Customers Promise to Pay in collections workbench. Collectors can create single or multiple promises to pay given by the customers with respect to each transaction. The system reconciles promises against customer payments. If payment is not received, Advanced Collections creates a broken promise and displays it in the Collector's Universal Work Queue. When the Promise gets broken the transaction automatically gets the status of delinquent.

Promises & Broken Promises (Screen-shot)

Disputed Transactions
Oracle Advanced collections Provides flexibility to enter disputes occurred with customers with respect to the transactions entered. Collectors can enter Dispute Amount along with Dispute Reason on Collection Workbench. Customer-wise details of Disputes (i.e. Disputed Amount, No. of Disputed Invoices etc.) is visible to collector in his Work Queue so that collector can take appropriate action accordingly. Once dispute is resolved with customer, collector can cancel it quoting the reason (Dispute Cancellation Note) and then it will be removed from the Work Queue of collector. Oracle Advanced Collections provides flexibility to create credit memo based on Disputes.

Disputed Transactions (Screen-shot)

Dunning Letters
Oracle Advanced Collections provides the ability to send Dunning Letters via fax, e-mail or printed letter. Collections use the Customers Collection Score and the Oldest Aged Invoice to determine the content and delivery method of the dunning notice. Thus Dunning Letters of different types can be sent to different customers. If payment is not made within a specified period of time, Advanced

Collections can automatically assign a dunning callback to a collector who

will see that action on their Universal Work Queue.

Dunning Letters (Screen-shot)

Aging
You can view your customer's outstanding account balances using any aging bucket defined in Oracle Receivables. Advanced Collections provides flexibility to view aging without running any report for different aging buckets. Advanced Collections provides feature of viewing the total as well as transaction-wise details of more than one age-brackets of an aging bucket at the same time.

You can also view the totals of Adjustments, Pending Adjustments and
Disputed Amounts for transactions falling under selected aging bucket.

Aging (Screen-shot)

Notes
Collectors can enter notes quoting the details of different activities performed with respect to a customer. Collector can also track each and every interaction with the customer.

Universal Work Queue

As the name itself suggests, Universal work Queue helps collectors in performing collection activities in a proper manner. Collectors Work Queue provides a high-level list of all actionable work assigned to or owned by a collections agent. The work is automatically pushed to the agent as part of the automated collections management flow provided by Oracle Advanced Collections. Thus collections agents do not need to waste their energies in finding work or remembering follow ups to be taken for different customers. Universal work queue provides collectors with all the tasks pending to be performed by him and allows him to update the same.

Universal Work Queue (Screen-Shot)

Benefits of the solution

By using Advanced Collections Collectors can ease their work and concentrate more on core collecting activities. With the help of Advanced Collections, organisation can design the collection strategies or send Dunning Letters to customers and make the collection process smoothly working. Moreover, collectors can also view their list of work through Universal Work Queue and make the regular follow up with customers in order to speed up the collection process. Advanced Collections allows you to copy any data from the collections workbench to MS Excel and perform different statistical activities without Performing the Export of the transactions. Advanced Collections also allows the collector to view all the transactions of customers in history tab. Oracle Advanced Collections supports the ability for collectors to also collect payment from customers along with other collection activities.