A media company carried a significant AR backlog. The VP of Operations engaged Numetrics360 to fix it. The problem ran deeper than anyone realized. A cash posting error had masked the true magnitude of the issue. Unwinding that error exposed the real problem underneath.

After interviewing staff individually, the breakdown became clear: sales had instructed the AR team to avoid contacting any customer until 180 days past due. The reasoning was fear of losing accounts.

The consequence was predictable. By 180 days, most customers had moved on. Ads ran long past any intention to pay. The AR balance ballooned with stale, uncollectable debt while the team sat on their hands waiting for a policy that protected customers who had already left.

“Sales and collections operated in silos. Nobody connected the two until we looked across both.”

We built contact lists directly from the AR aging report and redirected the team to call every account carrying a balance 60 days or older. The policy changed immediately. The team, now freed to do their jobs, reached customers who still intended to pay but simply had not heard from anyone.

Cash surged immediately. The AR team had not failed. They had been prevented from succeeding by a policy built on the wrong assumption. Removing that assumption unlocked the result.

The root cause was never an AR problem. It was a misalignment between sales and collections that nobody had connected until Numetrics360 looked across both.

Most delinquency is operational, not financial. When sales and collections operate in silos, the AR team gets blamed for a problem it didn’t create and can’t fix on its own. The solution lives upstream, in the policy that prevented collections from collecting in the first place.

Numetrics360 looks across departments simultaneously because that is where the real problems live.

A 20-minute conversation costs nothing and often confirms exactly what you suspected.