Accounts Receivable Collections Management

Today I'm going to give a tour of a custom Collections Management screen. Normally, I wouldn't share business process level customizations, but since the Financial modules are fairly independent of business process, I thought this might be of interest.

Need:
This business unit has several thousand customers and needed a convenient way to manage the processes of collecting on overdue accounts.

The primary goals were to:

1. easily identify and prioritize customers to contact
2. enable an informed conversation with the customer by clearly displaying the transactions in question
3. provide 'relationship management' features - a quick note saying "On May 29th I talked with Seth and he said the check would be cut that day"
4. make it easy to see how the customer performed in the past when they had an overdue balance

These 4 goals match the 4 tabs shown below.

So, let's begin the tour of the Collections Workbench.  I'll mostly let the screenshots do the talking.
Overview Tab

Note: Grid filter is turned on by default for quick searching by customer name, account
Columns

1. Tickler Date - user is able to set as a reminder to follow up
2. Name, Customer account -  for quick filtering via grid filter (which is turned on by default)
3. State - shown so we'd know the time zone for telephone calls
4. First Review - this is the date that the collections agent first clicks onto the transactions tab for the given record.  It's a bit casual, but seems to work well.
5. Notes - Quick view of most recent note.  We'll talk about this more on Tab #3 (Contacts/Notes). 
6. Created Date - when the customer first became overdue
7. Closed Date - when the customer was no longer overdue.  We'll talk about this more on Tab #4 (Closed Notes).

Buttons

1. Refresh Records - we chose to require a manual refresh of these records rather than calculating them in a batch job or real time.
2. Customers - link the customer record (standard AX)
3. Contact Person - link the the full list of contacts for that customer (standard AX) - see also Tab #3 (Contacts/Notes)
4. Open Transaction Editing - link to view/edit open transactions (standard AX)
5. Aging bucket statistics - link to show AR aging (standard AX)

Tickler Date Buttons
Tickler setup button show the following setup form that each user can use to configure their screen.  The dynamics buttons are created (i.e. "Tickler + 10 Days") and persisted in the usage data.  When the user clicks the button, the tickler date is 'pushed out' 10 days.

Transactions Tab

The user can view all open transactions and see which ones are contributing to the past due amount.
The user can print on invoice original or copy as the customer has many times 'lost' the invoice.

Contacts/Notes Tab

The contacts are shown so that the user can have a list in front of them during a phone call.

Notes field - this is essentially a 'journal' of the conversations and actions taken regarding this account.

Each time the user clicks the "Insert Stamp" button, a new line is added to the top of the Notes with their user ID/ date and places the cursor ready for them to type.  I've used this "Insert Stamp" concept lots of places and the users really like it.

Closed Notes Tab

This tab gives visibility to previous collections records for this customer.  In the example above, the customer had an overdue balance from 9/14 to 9/30/2010.  On the overview tab, you can see that there is a filter to show only record with no Closed Date.  The records on the Closed Notes tab are the opposite.