At Arrears, we understand that managing receivables should never be a burden to your team or a drain on your resources. That's why we've applied the power of automation to simplify your financial operations and capture cash flow more efficiently.
With Arrears, you can reduce payables and enhance your payment collection process with AI-driven strategies that:
- Provide timely recommendations for increased payments.
- Engage customers precisely when they're most likely to respond, leading to higher involvement and successful payment experiences.
- Anticipate payer behavior by analyzing payment patterns and responsiveness, improving strategies as the system learns from more interactions.
This guide aims to help you quickly get on your feet with the Arrears Platform so you can harness Automation and Artificial intelligence to enhance your Accounts Receivable process.
Table of Contents
Step 1: Sign Up/Sign In
Step 2: Customize your Payment Portal
Step 3: Add your first Accounts
Step 4: Set up collection settings
Step 5: Configure campaigns
Step 6: Subscribe
Step 7: Contact center
Step 8: Payments
Step 9: Other configurations
Step 1: Sign Up/Sign In
The journey starts like with any other software solution. The first step is to create an account. For that, you’ll need to go to the Sign Up page.
If you already have an account, just Sign In and skip to Step 3: Add your first Accounts.
.webp)
Fill out the form and click “Proceed” so the platform can send you an authentication email. It’ll look something like this:
After clicking “Verify your email,” a new page will be opened in your browser, and the customizable payment portal will pop up. Let’s see what that’s all about in the next step.
Step 2: Customize your Payment Portal
This is one of the most critical aspects of the setup since this portal will be where your clients pay their receivables. The Arrears payment portal is fully customizable. You can have a custom payment link and choose your business color pallet to offer a seamless brand experience to your customers.
Looking good! After saving your changes, you’ll be redirected to the Dashboard, where you can continue setting up your account through an easy onboarding. Let’s see how it’s done.
Step 3: Add your first Accounts
This is the first step of the onboarding… and it makes complete sense! You must upload your $clients’ data to manage their accounts effectively.
You can add accounts in 4 ways:
- One by One,
- Connecting to Quickbooks Online,
- Connecting to Quickbooks Desktop or,
- The one we will use for this course, uploading a CSV file.
If you decide to do a CSV import, we strongly recommend downloading the template to ensure your data aligns correctly with the system's format requirements.
Once you hit upload, a CSV upload wizard will open to help you ensure the data you uploaded is appropriately recognized by the platform. If you used the template, this takes just a few clicks.
Once contacts are uploaded, it’ll look something like this:
This dummy account only has three contacts at the moment, but you get the idea.
To go back to the onboarding, just click on “Dashboard” at the top-left of your screen:
You are on an incredible pace. Keep it up!
Step 4: Set up collection settings
Continuing the onboarding, it is time to set up your collection settings. Here, you’ll control all your preferences for your company’s collection process. You’ll find four components that need to be addressed to use Arrears to its full potential:
- Collection preferences
- Comunication preferences
- Payment portal customization
- Disputes
We already went over payment portal customization, so let’s dive deeper into the other three sections left.
Collection preferences
This section is all about defining the collection terms that fit your business operations. How many days will you extend payments? What’s the maximum number of payments you allow for your payment plans? Who covers the processing fees? Does the user need to be verified to make a payment?
All of that good stuff is set from here.
Communication preferences
As the name suggests, you can adjust everything related to customer interactions. You can put the phone you’ll use for collections, and turn on or off some features:
Disputes
Last but definitely not least, disputes. You can give your clients pre-defined reasons to start a dispute. You can also define if documents or comments are needed from their side to send the dispute, streamlining this tedious process significantly.
Step 5: Configure campaigns
Now, we are getting to the good part! Arrears lets you set up comprehensive collection campaigns that use dynamic content and AI to reach levels of personalization never seen before.
Once you click on “Configure campaigns” you’ll be sent to the Campaigns tab. There, you’ll see that there's a Default campaign already created. You can edit it or start from scratch by clicking “+ Create campaign.”
Arrears lets you create a campaign from already defined templates, saving you hours. Arrears has a default template structure you can use, but as your team gets comfy with the platform, they’ll be able to create their customized templates to speed up the work.
Creating a campaign
Now, there are four steps required to launch a campaign:
- Defining which accounts will be targeted,
- Setting up collection preferences (already done in the previous step),
- Setting up the schedule for the messaging, and
- Creating the message sequence.
Accounts
It works the same way as adding accounts, only in this case there is a new option: Add existing accounts. This lets you pull the accounts you previously uploaded to the platform.
Schedule
Here, you define when you want your communications to be sent. You can set the time manually or use Smart Timing for improved conversions. With Smart Timing, you are letting an AI decide the best time to send a communication based on previous customer behavior, such as email opening or payment time.
Sequence
This is a crucial aspect of the campaign: the message sequence. You can define how many consecutive messages or email reminders will be sent to a client, how often, and what they will say.
For the message content, you can use already templates, or generate new ones using GPT-4.
That’s it for campaigns! Let’s see the last step of the Onboarding (but not the last step of this guide).
Step 6: Subscribe
To start sending the highly effective collection campaigns you’ve just created, you’ll need to subscribe to the Arrears platform. The pricing is straightforward: a monthly flat fee of $249 + the credits you’ll be using to send the campaign’s messages.
This way, you’ll be able to squeeze the Arrears Platform to the fullest and start getting paid on time, every time.
But don’t go yet. There are some extra features we still need to talk about. The next one is one of our favourites.
Step 7: Contact center
The Arrears contact center has been thoroughly thought and designed to help AR teams lower the work load that customer inquiries require as much as possible. On this interface, you can respond to all the contacts from any device and communication platform. You’ll have quick access to all the information from the customer, the accounts, the payment plans, and the chat history.
You’ll also have instant access to important links like the payment platform, a “full payment” link, a link for the client to set up a payment plan, and a “schedule a payment” link.
Step 8: Payments
Streamline your collections and payment processing by connecting to one of the vendors. We suggest you use ArrearsPay. It not only has lower fees than Stripe but is a secure and efficient gateway that’s tailored for your business needs.
Follow these simple steps to connect to ArrearsPay:
- Locate the ArrearsPay option. You'll notice it is recommended due to its lower processing fee of 2.5% and its ability to handle high-volume transactions and multiple payment methods.
- Click on the green ‘Connect ArrearsPay Account’ button.
- Follow the on-screen instructions to integrate ArrearsPay with your system, allowing you to manage all payment-related operations within one platform.
That’s it! Connecting to ArrearsPay not only optimizes your revenue operations but also ensures a seamless transaction experience for both your business and your clients.
Step 9: Other configurations
Besides Analytics, a topic for another time, there’s only one section left: Settings. This drop-down welcomes us with four sub-categories:
- Collection settings: We’ve already covered this in Step 4.
- Settings: Easily integrate into CRMs and Accounting Software like Quickbooks or Xero.
- Members: Manage team members and access levels.
- Billing: Manage your account’s billing information.
Wrapping Up
We hope this platform walkthrough helped you get a grasp of Arrears capabilities. We purposely didn’t go over every feature we offer, so you still have something to discover when logging in next time.
Arrears empowers businesses to transform their accounts receivable processes through AI-driven automation and personalized engagement strategies. By choosing Arrears, you'll not only alleviate the workload on your team but also accelerate your cash flow and strengthen customer relations.
Embrace the innovation that awaits and step into a world where accounts receivable management is efficient, intuitive, and strategically optimized for your success, all at the same time.