Why I Built an AI AR Specialist That Chases Invoices

The call I used to dread

Ten years ago I was the junior guy on a finance team, and the worst hour of my week was the collections call with my CEO.

Our customers were banks and insurance companies. Enormous organizations, the kind where an invoice doesn't have an owner so much as a jurisdiction. I counted once: fifteen touchpoints between us and our money. Inside one client there were ten people who each owned one slice of the process, and all ten were very clear about which slices they did not own.

So I chased. Some emails vanished. Some came back with "please reach out to so-and-so," who pointed me to someone else, who was on leave. And some got the reply every collections person knows by heart: "this is sitting with approvals." Sitting with. As if the money had found a comfortable chair.

Every week, before that call, I spent ten to fifteen hours assembling the picture. Not doing the follow-ups, mind you. Preparing to talk about them. Which invoices were where. Who had promised what. Which thread had gone quiet. What we were waiting on from their side, and what was still stuck on ours. Fifteen hours, and I still walked in feeling underprepared, because the truth lived in six inboxes, four spreadsheets, and the memory of a client contact who had changed roles in March.

What stays with me isn't the workload. It's the dread. The money was out there. Earned, invoiced, acknowledged. And I could not make it move. I had no control over the client's org chart, and if I'm honest, not much more over the state of things on our own side.

Somewhere in that stretch I decided one of two things had to be true. Either this problem was unsolvable, or every tool that claimed to solve it was built for someone else. The enterprise AR platforms were built for departments of forty. The reminder features inside accounting software fire the same template into the same void I was already shouting into. Nothing lived in the middle, where a real business with a small finance team actually operates.

I chewed on that gap for ten years, through an accounting qualification and a decade of leading finance teams across multiple geographies. RevCollect is what came out of the chewing.

The problem is not that you forget

Almost nobody fails to collect because they forgot an invoice existed. I have never once met that person.

People fail to collect because chasing is miserable work that lands on exactly the people least equipped to absorb it. If you run a services firm doing a few million in revenue, your entire finance department fits in one car. Often it's just you, at 9pm, typing "just following up on invoice #204" and hating every word, because tomorrow morning you're back on a call with this same client as their trusted partner.

Nobody wants to play debt collector to their own clients. So the follow-up slips a day. Then a week. The thread goes cold, the client's AP person changes, and the invoice quietly ages from 30 days to 60 to 90 while you do the work you actually started the business to do. Meanwhile that cash sits in someone else's bank account, earning their interest instead of yours. If you've never measured what that delay costs you, start with your days sales outstanding. The number usually stings.

So I built a hire, not a tool

RevCollect isn't another dashboard to check or another workflow to babysit. You hire it the way you'd hire a full-time AR specialist: someone diligent, unfailingly polite, and slightly relentless. Ours is called ARI. The difference is that ARI never dreads the follow-up, never loses the thread, and never needs fifteen hours to prepare the picture.

ARI connects to your accounting system, QuickBooks or Xero, and builds one canonical view of your receivables. Then it does the job. It works out who to chase first, weighing how much is owed against how long it has been outstanding. It writes payment reminder emails that read like a human wrote them, because it has read the whole prior thread and knows what was promised and when. It attaches the invoice and the statement, so "can you resend that?" dies as a stalling tactic. It includes the payment link. Then it follows up again, and again, courteously, until the money lands.

You stay in control of tone and cadence. Your clients deal with a well-informed, well-mannered specialist. You get paid without being the one who nagged.

What it's made of

I'll spare you the architecture diagrams. Two principles run through everything we build, and they explain why this works where reminder bots don't.

Don't add features, add context. My emails went into the void ten years ago not because I was missing a button, but because I was missing context. Who actually pays this invoice? What did they say last time? What did we agree to? Every improvement we ship makes ARI know more before it writes a word. Very few add another toggle to a settings page.

The intelligence lives in your data, not in the model. Think of the AI model as a pen. Your receivables history, your email threads, your customers' payment behavior: that's the brain. We built RevCollect so the pen is replaceable. As models improve, ARI improves, and nothing it has learned about your customers gets lost. What compounds over time is understanding: which client pays the day the link arrives, which one needs a statement plus a nudge to a specific person in AP, which one always goes quiet at quarter end.

That understanding is what I used to rebuild by hand, every week, for fifteen hours. Now it's simply there each morning, current.

One more thing I held onto from those years. When you open RevCollect, you should know what needs attention in about three seconds, the way opening your alarm app tells you exactly when you're getting up. And the first number you see is never "emails sent." Nobody hires an AR specialist to send emails. The first number is the money: what got recovered, and how much faster it's arriving.

The measure that matters

I hold ARI to the standard I'd set for any hire: recovered revenue and DSO, in dollars and days. If those don't move, the specialist isn't doing the job. Everything else is activity, and activity never made payroll.

An offer, in the spirit of all this

We're early, and deliberately so. We're building alongside a small set of pilot businesses before opening up widely, because a new hire should be excellent before it is everywhere.

But here's something I'm glad to do for any business owner reading this today: a free AR audit. Send us your aging report and we'll show you where your money is stuck, which invoices to chase first, and what your receivables are quietly costing you. No demo, no obligation. Bias disclosed: I obviously think ARI should do your chasing, but the audit is useful either way.

You did the work. You should get paid for it, without dreading a single call.

Vaidhy is a qualified accountant with deep specialization in accounting and finance, and 12+ years leading finance teams across multiple geographies. He builds RevCollect, the AI AR specialist that chases invoices so you never have to.