AR Collections & Dunning Automation

The problem you are actually facing

Your AR aging report tells you what is overdue. It does not tell you who called the customer, what they promised, whether the promise was kept, or who is supposed to chase next. That knowledge lives in one collector's inbox and one shared spreadsheet, and it walks out of the door when they take a week off.

So the pattern repeats. Reminders go out inconsistently — some customers get chased at day 5, others at day 60, a few strategic accounts get chased by accident and someone has to apologise. A customer says "we will pay on the 20th" and nobody records it, so the next reminder fires on the 18th and undoes the goodwill. Disputed invoices sit in the same bucket as forgotten ones, so collectors waste calls on items that were never going to pay until a credit was issued. Meanwhile nobody can answer the only question the CFO asks: what is our promised cash for the next fortnight, and how much of last month's promised cash actually arrived?

Native NetSuite gives you the aging, the invoices, the customer record and email capability. What it does not give you is the collections process on top: a staged dunning ladder, a worklist that tells each collector who to call today in what order, promise-to-pay as a tracked object with a kept-or-broken outcome, and dispute handling that suppresses chasing while the credit is decided.

What ECOSIRE builds

This is built to order inside your NetSuite account as a SuiteScript 2.1 and SuiteFlow customization. There is no pre-existing app to install today.

Dunning ladder

We configure a staged ladder as data, not hard-coded logic: a custom record per dunning stage with its trigger (days past due, days since last contact, or exposure threshold), its channel, its template, and its escalation target. Stages can differ by customer segment, by subsidiary, by sales channel or by credit rating, so a strategic enterprise account and a small self-serve customer are never treated identically. A scheduled script evaluates open AR each day through saved searches, determines the due stage for each invoice or each customer-level balance, and creates a dunning action record.

Emails are generated from templates that merge real transaction data — invoice number, PO number, amount, due date, days overdue, statement of all open items — and are sent through NetSuite email with the sending role and reply-to you specify, so replies land with the right person. Sends are logged against the transaction and the customer so the timeline survives the collector.

Collector worklists

Each collector gets a worklist driven by saved searches and a custom dashboard: accounts assigned to them, ordered by a prioritisation score you define — typically exposure, days past due, broken-promise history and risk grade. Working an account from the worklist opens a collection activity record where the collector logs the contact channel, outcome, and next action, and where a promise-to-pay can be captured in one step. Assignment supports round-robin, by sales rep, by subsidiary or by customer segment, and reassignment is a supported operation rather than an edit to a spreadsheet.

Promise-to-pay tracking

A promise-to-pay custom record captures the promised amount, promised date, the invoices covered, who gave the promise and who took the call. A scheduled script checks each promise against actual Customer Payment and Deposit Application records, marks it kept, partially kept or broken, and suppresses dunning for the covered invoices until the promised date passes. Broken promises feed back into the prioritisation score and into an escalation workflow, which is the point: a customer who has broken two promises should not receive a third gentle reminder.

Disputes and holds

Disputed invoices are flagged with a reason code and routed by SuiteFlow to the owning sales rep or a dispute queue with an SLA. While a dispute is open, dunning is suppressed for that invoice but the aging is unaffected, so nothing hides. Payment plans and account-level holds work the same way — a suppression with an owner, a reason and an expiry, never a silent skip.

Credit control

We surface credit limit, current exposure including open orders, and available credit on the customer record, and add a User Event script that warns or blocks at order entry based on rules you set per segment. Credit review requests route through SuiteFlow to the approver, and limit changes are recorded with the requester, approver and justification.

Reporting

Delivered saved searches and datasets cover DSO and its trend, aging by collector and by segment, promised cash for the next 7/14/30 days, promise-kept rate by collector and by customer, dunning stage distribution, dispute ageing against SLA, and a per-account contact history. Every number traces back to records a collector can open.

Who this is for

NetSuite finance teams where one to twenty collectors chase AR across hundreds or thousands of open invoices; businesses whose overdue balance is material enough that a week of DSO is real money; distributors and service firms where credit control and order release need to be connected. If you have fewer than a handful of overdue invoices a month, a saved search reminder will serve you better and we will say so.

How delivery works

1. Scoping call. We review your current aging, your escalation policy as actually practised, your segments and subsidiaries, who your collectors are, and what your invoice and statement communications look like today.

2. Fixed quote and specification. You get a written specification of the dunning ladder, every custom record, script, workflow, template and saved search, with the fixed price and delivery date. Nothing is built until you approve it.

3. Build. Developed as an SDF project under source control against your specification.

4. Install in sandbox. Deployed to your sandbox with a copy of real AR, then run in dry-run mode: the system computes every dunning action and worklist it would have taken over a historical period, with sends redirected to internal addresses. You review that output before a single customer email is possible.

5. Install in production. After sign-off we deploy to production, usually enabling one segment or one subsidiary first, and monitor the first live dunning cycle with you before widening.

6. Support window. A defect-fix support window follows go-live. The SDF project and source are yours, so you can tune the ladder and templates yourself afterwards.