Debt collection in B2B often requires a delicate balance. Handle it poorly, and invoices sit unpaid for weeks or months. Push too hard, and customer relationships suffer, potentially affecting future revenue. The reality is that manual processes in fragmented inboxes, spreadsheets, and inconsistent follow-ups make it difficult for finance teams to strike the right balance. AI agents are changing the game. By managing high-volume billing and payment conversations autonomously, they help businesses recover payments faster, resolve disputes efficiently, and maintain professional, consistent communication with customers.

The cash conversion cycle (CCC) is a key measure of working capital efficiency, capturing how long cash remains tied up in operations from paying suppliers to collecting from customers. Even profitable organisations can face liquidity stress if CCC is not actively managed. This article explains how to calculate CCC, explores the factors that influence it, and highlights common pitfalls to avoid. It also examines international complexities, including currency risk, local payment norms, and regulatory considerations. One of the most effective levers for shortening CCC is reducing Days Sales Outstanding (DSO). AR automation tool, such as Paraglide help finance teams accelerate collections, manage disputes proactively, and track outstanding payments, freeing working capital and enabling finance teams to focus on higher-value tasks. By combining operational improvements with intelligent automation, businesses can improve liquidity, reduce reliance on external financing, and achieve a more predictable and resilient cash conversion cycle.

Working capital is the cash a business has available to fund day-to-day operations and support growth. Challenges like delayed customer payments, excess or mismanaged inventory, and suboptimal payables tie up cash, reduce financial agility, and make it harder to fund strategic initiatives. AI Agents are transforming how finance teams manage working capital by automating repetitive tasks, providing predictive insights, and enabling proactive cash decisions. They help reduce Days Sales Outstanding (DSO), optimise inventory, improve payables timing, and accelerate cash conversion. Organisations using AI consistently report improved efficiency, better cash visibility, and faster decision-making. Solutions such as Paraglide integrate seamlessly into finance workflows, allowing teams to focus on high-value activities while ensuring cash is managed more effectively.

Trade receivables are amounts customers owe a business for goods or services sold on credit. They are recorded as current assets on the balance sheet and play a vital role in managing working capital and cash flow. Keeping track of the money customers owe helps finance teams understand whether the business is getting paid on time and spot any potential cash shortages before they become a problem. While traditional processes focus on invoicing and reminders, AI agents can take this further by handling customer communications, resolving disputes, and managing collections automatically. This reduces the burden on finance teams, speeds up payments, and improves financial predictability.

Dunning is the process of following up on overdue invoices to ensure payment is received. It is a structured workflow that includes reminders, resolving issues that block payment, and escalating when necessary, all while keeping customer relationships professional and consistent. In SaaS companies, dunning works a little differently. Recurring revenue doesn’t always mean cash arrives on time, because unpaid invoices are often stuck in subscription workflows, billing questions, or internal accounts payable processes. Early-stage dunning confirms invoices are received and sent to the right person, while later stages involve more structured follow-ups, escalations, and actions tailored to different customer types. Effective dunning is more than sending reminder emails. Automation handles both routine follow-ups and the more complex tasks that arise when payments are delayed, but AI agents take it further. They can manage incoming emails, resolve disputes, capture missing information, and update systems automatically, making the entire dunning process and collections faster for finance teams.

Finance shared services, particularly order-to-cash (O2C) teams, face constant pressure to scale, reduce cost-to-serve, and maintain high-quality operational control. Even with standardised O2C processes, teams spend a disproportionate amount of time managing invoice disputes, payment follow-ups, claims, deductions, and credit workflows. In 2026, AI agents for O2C and finance operations are emerging as a practical extension of shared services teams. They automate high-volume operational work, handling account queries, following up on commitments, escalating exceptions, and maintaining workflow continuity, allowing finance professionals to focus on decision-making, exceptions, and strategic initiatives.

Working capital management is a critical lever for finance leaders seeking to improve cash flow, operational flexibility, and business resilience. While many organisations focus on a single balance sheet figure, leading finance teams track multiple metrics to identify precisely where cash is tied up, including receivables, payables, inventory, and capital efficiency. In 2026, AI agents are increasingly helping finance teams optimise working capital by reducing delays in collections, resolving disputes, and providing actionable insights without adding headcount. This guide explores the seven key working capital metrics, how to calculate them, practical examples, and how AI agents can improve outcomes—especially by reducing Days Sales Outstanding (DSO).

SAP FI-AR (Financial Accounting – Accounts Receivable) is a core ERP module used by finance teams to manage customer invoices, balances, and receivables at scale, providing the visibility, accuracy, and controls required to run disciplined AR operations. Within SAP FI-AR, dunning letters are formal, structured reminders sent to customers to prompt payment, confirm commitments, or surface disputes as invoices age. Automating dunning in SAP FI-AR enables teams to generate reminders, apply escalation rules, track outcomes, and reduce manual administrative work. When implemented effectively, SAP FI-AR dunning automation delivers consistent customer communication, faster cash collection, improved cash-flow forecasting, and reduced risk of late or missed payments. Paraglide is an agentic accounts receivable automation tool designed to work alongside ERP solutions such as SAP. Paraglide manages two-way dunning communication directly from the finance inbox with AI agents that automate two-way billing and collection conversations to help businesses get paid faster.

Sage is the ERP system of record for many AR teams, managing invoices, customer balances, and ageing. To turn ageing into cash, teams rely on dunning: structured, policy-aligned overdue messages that escalate over time to prompt payment or surface disputes early. Dunning automation inside Sage helps ensure the right message goes out at the right stage, improving consistency and reducing manual effort. But “automation” in practice needs more than scheduled reminders because collections often require two-way conversations, not one-way email sequences. This is where AI agents come in. They extend traditional dunning automation by handling replies, sending segmented and personalised reminders, tracking promises to pay, and automating follow-ups. Paraglide is an agentic accounts receivable automation tool designed to work alongside ERP solutions like Sage. Paraglide automates dunning conversations directly in the finance inbox with AI agents to help businesses get paid on time and reduce DSO.

NetSuite AR module provides tools to manage invoices, customer balances, and overdue accounts across organisations. Dunning letters and reminders in NetSuite formalise communication with overdue accounts, helping to trigger payments or identify disputes. Automating dunning reduces manual effort, ensures consistent communication, applies escalation rules, and enforces late payment charges where applicable. AI agents and automation tools can complement NetSuite, managing replies to the dunning letters, prioritising high-risk invoices, resolving routine billing queries, tracking payment commitments, and removing bottlenecks. Paraglide is an agentic accounts receivable automation tool that works alongside Sage, managing two-way dunning communication, managing replies to dunning letters in the finance inbox, escalation logic, and feedback into AR and credit without changing accounting logic or ERP controls.

Dunning software is a type of accounts receivable software that automates the process of collecting overdue payments from customers, typically by sending payment reminders. Legacy dunning tools focus on one-way, time-based reminder emails, which break down as soon as customers reply or dispute payments. Today’s B2B dunning software is conversational and context-aware, designed to resolve payment blockers, not just send reminders. Agentic dunning software personalises collection outreach, automates replies to billing queries, manage replies, tracks promises to pay, and follow up automatically. Paraglide automates two-way billing and collection conversations in the finance inbox, automating and personalising payment reminders, managing replies and follow-ups to reduce manual work, lower DSO, and help businesses get paid on time.

Bad debt, doubtful allowances, and impairments are more than accounting concepts; they are practical levers that allow finance leaders to anticipate risk, protect cash flow, and make informed, confident decisions. These concepts work together as an ongoing credit risk management framework. By understanding how these concepts relate, spotting early warning signals in collection behaviour, and implementing a structured decision-making framework, finance teams can move from reactive write-offs to proactive management. Bad debt is the amount confirmed as uncollectible after reasonable recovery efforts fail, resulting in a write-off and a hit to profitability. Doubtful allowances are a proactive estimate of receivables unlikely to be collected, calculated using ageing, historical defaults, and customer-specific factors, reducing net AR without reversing revenue. Impairments are recognised when a receivable’s recoverable value declines due to credit deterioration, disputes, or customer financial difficulty, often before formal default, aligned with IFRS 9 expected credit loss thinking. Allowances predict portfolio-level loss, impairments flag specific exposures, and bad debt confirms loss once recovery is no longer realistic. Bad debt builds quietly through unresolved billing queries, missing documentation, slow dispute resolution, and broken payment promises. Early warning signs hide in email threads, CRM notes, and support tickets, not financial systems.

AI is not just automation, it spans three distinct approaches: rules-based automation, AI copilots, and AI agents; each suited to different types of work. AI agents represent a shift from assistance to execution, taking actions across systems, completing end-to-end workflows under human supervision and actually doing the work. Finance has adopted AI more cautiously than functions such as engineering, support, and sales. Finance is now well-positioned for agentic adoption, particularly in high-volume, repetitive, and measurable work. The highest-ROI uses of AI agents today are in operational finance, where these conditions are most common. The first and clearest high-ROI use cases are accounts receivable (billing support and collections automation) and accounts payable (invoice capture, coding, matching, and duplicate detection) Real value comes from agentic-native platforms that can safely act within systems, not legacy tools with chatbots rebranded as “AI-powered.”

At 1,000-10,000 invoices per month, AR teams receive 50-150 customer emails weekly - roughly one email for every 20-40 invoices - requesting missing documents, dispute resolutions, and payment confirmations. 60-80% of payment delays are caused by emails, not invoices; ERPs and standard workflow tools cannot manage the conversation layer of accounts receivable. AI-native AR automation converts inbox chaos into structured data: AI agents AR platforms read customer emails, extract promise-to-pay commitments, identify dispute patterns, and sync updates to the ERP, eliminating the manual triage that consumes entire workdays. The impact is measurable: AI-driven AR automation is correlated with 75% of finance teams reporting Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) improvement of 6+ days when AI is part of their receivables stack. Paraglide is a purpose-built Accounts Receivable (AR) software that automates the inbox layer with AI, handling 2-way emails in 100+ languages, retrieving documents, capturing promise-to-pay commitments, and escalating only when human judgment is required.

AR teams managing hundreds or thousands of invoices per month hit a ceiling that process changes alone cannot fix. The constraint is not invoicing or reminder cadence; it is the volume of customer communication required before payment can proceed. Requests for invoice copies, PO validation, dispute resolution, and payment confirmation drive most delays. When these messages sit unanswered in finance inboxes, invoices age even when customers intend to pay. Workflow automation cannot manage inbound AR communication: ERPs and traditional AR tools track balances and send reminders, but they cannot read customer replies, resolve questions, or capture promise-to-pay commitments hidden in email threads. Platforms like Paraglide operate directly inside the finance inbox, using AI agents to manage customer replies, retrieve documents, capture promise-to-pay dates, and escalate only when human judgment is required, removing the communication bottleneck that drives DSO.

Credit management breaks at scale when inbound communication overtakes outbound control: Once AR teams manage hundreds or thousands of invoices per month, delays are driven less by invoicing or reminders and more by unanswered customer emails related to disputes, documentation, and payment confirmation. Most credit management solutions automate reminders, scoring, and reporting, but rely on manual inbox work to resolve inbound queries. In 2026, the most valuable credit management software reduces manual work by automating follow-ups, capturing responses, and updating the ERP without adding AR workload. Paraglide is one of the best credit management platforms for high‑volume AR. It automates two-way customer communication inside the finance inbox, handles over 100 languages, captures promises-to-pay in real-time, and moves commitments into the ERP, targeting the bottleneck that delays payments.

Decreasing DSO is about more than chasing customers faster — it's about building smarter, data-driven, and automated AR workflows. With AI agents managing reminders, resolving issues, and escalating intelligently, finance teams can collect faster, improve cash flow, and maintain strong customer relationships.

Automating B2B collections isn't just about sending reminders faster — it's about creating intelligent, context-aware workflows that mirror what great collectors already do. AI agents now make that possible: they handle routine outreach, track commitments, resolve issues early, and keep humans focused on exceptions. The result is improved cash flow, happier customers, and a finance team that finally scales with the business.

The accounts receivable turnover ratio is a simple but powerful measure of how efficiently a company turns sales into cash. It is directly connected to DSO and free cash flow, making it a key KPI for finance teams. By improving collections processes, monitoring turnover closely, and reducing DSO, companies can unlock cash, strengthen working capital, and reduce financial risk.

Kundreskontra är en central process för alla företag, men den har länge varit tung och arbetsintensiv. Med AI och automatisering kan företag nu frigöra tid, minska DSO, förbättra AR turnover och få bättre kontroll över sina åldersanalyser. Resultatet blir snabbare inbetalningar, starkare kassaflöde och en ekonomiavdelning som kan fokusera på det som verkligen driver värde.

Free cash flow conversion is a vital measure of financial strength because it shows how much of your reported earnings actually makes it into the bank. The biggest drag on FCF conversion is usually working capital, and within that, slow-paying customers. By managing accounts receivable tightly and reducing DSO, companies can unlock significant amounts of cash and transform weak FCF conversion into strong performance.

Net Working Capital is a simple formula, but it reveals a lot about a company’s liquidity and financial flexibility. Positive NWC gives room to invest and grow, while negative NWC signals stress. The biggest challenge for most companies is managing accounts receivable. When customers pay late, DSO rises, AR balloons, and free cash flow suffers. By reducing DSO and modernizing collections with automation, companies can strengthen their working capital position and unlock millions in cash.

AI accounts receivable automation is reshaping the way finance teams work. By automating both inbound inbox queries and outbound dunning workflows, AI agents reduce DSO, improve collections, and free finance teams to focus on higher-value work. The future of AR is not about replacing clerks, but about empowering them to manage intelligent agents that handle the repetitive tasks. Companies that embrace AI in accounts receivable collections will accelerate cash flow, reduce bad debt, and build stronger customer experiences.

The formula for DSO is simple, but the insights it provides are powerful. By tracking DSO consistently, comparing it with benchmarks, and applying best practices, finance teams can improve collections and unlock cash. If your DSO is climbing, it may be time to modernize your accounts receivable process. AI powered AR automation can help you collect faster, reduce disputes, and free your team from manual chasing.

The role of the credit controller is evolving. Today, much of the job involves repetitive email and phone conversations with customers. Tomorrow, AI agents will handle these at scale, allowing humans to focus on the judgment calls, the disputes, and the exceptions that truly require their expertise. Credit controllers will not be replaced. They will be elevated, moving up the value chain to manage AI-driven teams of agents and focus on more strategic, value-adding work.

AI agents are redefining the order-to-cash process. They can interpret contracts, create invoices, manage finance inbox queries, automate dunning and collections workflows, resolve disputes, and streamline cash application and reconciliation. Where shared services reduce cost by moving manual work offshore, AI eliminates the manual work altogether. The result is faster collections, fewer disputes, stronger cash flow, and finance teams that can focus on strategy instead of repetition.

Debt collection is no longer confined to manual chasing, expensive outsourcing, or rigid dunning software. AI agents are redefining the process by handling contextual outreach, managing two-way conversations, tracking promises to pay, escalating intelligently, and even using voice channels to reach customers. For CFOs, the benefits are clear: faster collections, lower DSO, reduced bad debt, and less reliance on costly collection agencies. For AR teams, AI takes on the heavy lifting, allowing humans to focus on disputes, escalations, and strategy.

AI agents bring a new paradigm to dunning workflows. Instead of static, one-size-fits-all reminder sequences that customers ignore, companies can now run personalized, conversational, and context-aware collection processes at scale. By capturing promise-to-pay dates, maintaining continuity of escalation, and applying proven tactics from AI-driven sales outreach, AI agents can act like a full AR team, chasing payments, resolving queries, and escalating only when needed. For CFOs, the benefits are clear: lower DSO, fewer bad debts, reduced headcount pressure, and less reliance on costly collection agencies.

AI agents are reshaping credit control by automating the conversational, repetitive work that has long dominated the role. They can respond to inbound queries, run outbound dunning and collection workflows, and hold two-way conversations that drive faster payments. For CFOs, the benefits are clear: lower dso, stronger cash flow, fewer overdue invoices, and finance teams freed from repetitive tasks. for credit controllers, the job evolves from manual chasing to managing intelligent agents and focusing on the disputes and decisions where humans add the most value.

Debt collection agencies cost anywhere from 10% to 50% of recovered amounts, with most B2B companies paying around 15–20%. But the bigger cost comes from letting invoices age, then outsourcing the work to humans who do the same manual chasing at a premium. AI agents provide a smarter alternative. They automate dunning workflows, handle two-way conversations, track promises to pay, resolve issues early, and even leverage voice channels. The result is lower DSO, stronger cash flow, and far less reliance on expensive agencies.

Accounts Receivable Days is a powerful liquidity metric that shows how efficiently your company turns credit sales into cash. It is closely connected to DSO, AR turnover, and net working capital. If your A/R Days are trending higher, it is a signal that cash is trapped in receivables and collections need attention. By modernizing your AR processes, leveraging automation, and reducing DSO, you can strengthen working capital and unlock millions in free cash flow.

The best finance teams are moving from static, rule-based reminders to dynamic, conversational workflows powered by AI. AI agents now handle thousands of customers simultaneously, personalise outreach, find the right contacts, track promises to pay, involve account owners when needed, and escalate intelligently at the customer level. The result: faster collections, lower DSO, fewer disputes, and better customer experiences — without adding headcount or outsourcing collections.

Accounts receivable aging is a foundational tool in working capital management. By structuring invoices into clear time buckets, AR teams gain visibility into payment risk, collections priorities, and cash flow impacts. When combined with metrics like DSO and AR turnover, AR aging helps finance teams act decisively: reducing late payments, improving liquidity, and protecting against bad debt. Want to see how AI-powered AR automation can streamline aging reports and collections? Book a demo with our team.

In large AR teams, overdue payments are usually due to inbox overload, not customer refusal to pay. High volumes of routine queries, missing POs, disputes, remittances, and invoice requests create delays that increase DSO, weaken forecasting, and stretch teams beyond capacity. AI agents for accounts receivable remove this bottleneck by automating high-volume finance communication. Agentic AR solutions can read and respond to emails, capture promise-to-pay dates, resolve disputes, match payments, and sync updates to ERP systems, turning unstructured inbox traffic into structured cash-flow data.

Getting customers to pay on time isn't about sending more reminders — it's about creating a system that makes payment easy, clear, and consistent. With AI agents handling the repetitive, conversational, and time-sensitive parts of collections, finance teams can focus on strategy and relationships. The result: fewer overdue invoices, healthier cash flow, and customers who pay on time — every time.