Heroes of AR: How AR Teams Can Get A Seat At the Strategic Table

In the first part of this episode, Pradyut Hande and Sarah McCauley explored automation, agentic AI, and how technology is reshaping the present and future of AR. In the second part, they zoom out and go back to some sacrosanct AR basics.

In AR, while everyone talks about collections, very few talk about the real problem: the widening gap between the revenue companies celebrate and the cash they actually receive. Sarah explores this gap head on.

They also talk about the daily realities AR teams face: upstream exceptions, broken handoffs, misaligned incentives; and why AR professionals, despite sitting on some of the most valuable operational intelligence in the company, often feel unheard.

Check out this insightful dialog that exposes the systems, habits, and blind spots that quietly drain cashflow across companies.

Why is there a disconnect between booked revenue and realized collections?

PH: Cash is essentially oxygen for any business. But; we’ve seen that at an organizational level, payments often get delayed. That’s just par for the course. You’ll never be able to collect optimally at the right time consistently. This also leads to a lot of mismanaged or unplanned working capital actions, which also raises the cost of borrowing. Why do you think there is this disconnect between booked revenue and realized collections?

SM: Well, you’re getting into one of my favorite AR themes here. Cash is oxygen for any business. I feel like most companies are operating in this space of holding their breath because booked revenue is a promise. It’s not a guarantee. Ultimately, think of it this way: your Accounts Receivable team doesn’t create the problem. When cash is delayed, it’s not because of your AR team. It’s often because of something that occurred way upstream that they have no control over.

A booking is a booking, and the revenue is wonderful. We need the sale to run the business. There’s no gray area there. Your AR team is a support to your Sales team. They didn’t work with the customer for three months. They didn’t create the quote. They didn’t make the commitments. They’re inheriting the functions that upstream teams performed to build that customer relationship and ensure the money comes in.

So often you'll hear, “We have a collections problem.” Very rarely does any company have a collections problem. Almost every single time, you have a dispute problem, an exceptions problem, or a process and policy problem. When you create exceptions to your policy, you’re going outside of how your business was set up to operate. When you have an exception, be prepared for a dispute: you’re creating the opportunity for cashflow delays.

When exceptions become the norm, disputes become the norm. This is because you’re doing things your company wasn’t set up to do. Things your systems weren’t set up to do. When I come into a company, one of the first things I ask is: How are you billing as a percentage of your bookings? That’s going to give you a really good bar. If your booked revenue is 100% but; you’re billing 80% each month of what you book, that’s a huge signal.

Smaller companies especially often don’t know how they’re billing as a percentage of what they’re booking. And; a lot of what they’re billing, they’re billing manually because smaller companies have fewer resources. But; how you think about the future state of your operational enablement becomes really important.

Then you need to understand how you’re collecting as a percentage of your billing. I use a measure of months zero to four. With month zero being the month you billed. So let’s say billing in January is 80% of your booking. You should be collecting 85-90% of that within months zero to three, depending on terms. If you don’t know that you only ever collect 85%, and you’re forecasting for 100%, and you only billed 80%, you’re already in a cash deficit.

PH: Totally with you. On the surface it sounds intuitive. But; turning intelligence into action is where the challenge lies.

SM: Agreed. Let me give you an example. When I was with InVision in the early years of the company, one of the things I did was create a cash receipt forecast: not just cash, but payer behavior. We did the analytics and cohort reporting to understand how we were collecting as a percentage of how we were billing. We got that locked in pretty tight.

And; when we built our FP&A team, they were super engaged with that forecast because they understood what part was operational cash and what part was fund cash. Eventually, we locked the forecast into about 98% accuracy. Every single week, we knew what we were going to collect. Imagine that level of predictability. That’s the impact of AR partnering with FP&A.

TL;DR:

• Many companies operate under the false assumption that booked revenue is guaranteed, when it’s actually a fragile promise dependent on flawless upstream execution
• Breakdowns in quoting, contracting, billing, and policy exceptions create issues that AR inherits despite not causing them
• Organizations that don’t track billing accuracy and collection behavior end up forecasting based on optimism rather than reality
• Cashflow leaks aren’t accidents. They’re engineered gradually through repeated exceptions and process deviations
  

How can AR professionals gain a voice at the strategic table?

PH: We’ve covered a lot of ground, Sarah, which brings me to the last question. You talked about AR voices being muted. We talk about elevating AR folks and turning them into real heroes. So for those in the trenches - Collectors, AR Managers, Controllers, Heads of AR - how can they actually start getting a voice at the table and influence decisions regarding cash flow control?

SM: I love that question. It’s foundational to the work I do. First: you don’t need to have “VP” or “Director” in your title to influence. Where AR professionals lose their voice is often self-inflicted. We live in the world of numbers, metrics, KPIs, cash-cash-cash.

Are you speaking AR? Or; are you speaking in terms the business will actually listen to? If you walk into your CFO’s office with dashboards that don’t translate into business outcomes. That information goes in one ear and out the other.

For example, don’t say:
“DSO is 55 days.”

Say:
“If we resolve this dispute, DSO improves by 15 days in three months - freeing up more operating cash and improving predictability.”

That changes everything.

With Sales, you want them to be your biggest advocates. They have relationships you’ll never have. But; there’s always tension because Sales wants bookings and AR needs cash. Lead with empathy. Understand their quotas and their unique pressures.

Ask them:

“How do you want me to deliver information about slow-pay customers?”
“Which deals get delayed most frequently?”

With Customer Success, connect AR data to potential churn. That changes the conversation dramatically, because it aligns with their incentives.

With leadership, translate AR metrics into business objectives and OKRs. They don’t care about the aging report until it impacts cash so much that the business feels a pinch.

And here’s the truth: AR professionals sit on a goldmine of information. They can tell you instantly which segments pay 45 days late. But they’re buried under tickets, emails, and receipts. Their voices don’t get elevated. Raising that voice required intent, training, and practice. That’s how I advanced my career: adding value in spaces beyond the spreadsheet.

TL;DR:

• AR’s lack of influence isn’t due to weak capability. It is actually a translation gap: AR speaks in aging buckets while the business listens for impact, risk, and strategic levers
• Influence grows when AR reframes its insights in the language of sales incentives, customer success outcomes, and leadership OKRs
• AR holds powerful data: renewal risk signals, behavior trends, dispute patterns. But; much of it stays buried under inbox and manual task overload
• When AR translates this knowledge into business terms, it earns true cross-functional partnership and is finally recognized as a revenue protection engine

5 Strategic Takeaways

1. Accounts Receivable teams aren’t just processing receivables. They are managing the real-time pulse of customer behavior, risk, and renewal signals
2. What AR sees first is often what leadership sees last, not due to lack of insight but lack of visibility and space for their voice
3. Booked revenue is only the handshake. AR is the function that actually closes the loop and realizes cash
4. Collections aren't back-office busywork. It's the final, critical leg of the revenue engine and essential for cashflow survival
5. AR already holds the most accurate truth about a company’s financial health. They just need the platform and language to influence decisions upstream