Collections

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Collections in Tabs is about getting paid faster and doing less work to get there. Tabs gives you the tools to automate the work needed after an invoice goes out: sending dunning reminders, replying to customer emails, submitting invoices to portals, and tracking receivables. Our Collections Agent monitors every account for anything needing action in addition to submitting invoices to customer portals where required.

Tabs is also the source of truth for the context collections runs on. Every email exchanged with the customer, every internal note, and every action taken on the account live in one place, so nobody has to rebuild the context by hand and nothing drops off the account when someone leaves.

Role in Tabs

How the pieces fit:

  1. Billing terms generate the invoices to be sent
  2. Payments provides the rails to receive payment and the engine to reconcile it through cash application
  3. Collections tracks, chases, and handles the manual work after an invoice is sent, including customer replies and portal submissions
  4. Payment and reconciliation data sync back to your ERP

For the full entity hierarchy, see Tabs data model.

Knowing what you’re owed

Tabs gives you three views of your receivables:

  • Billing lists every invoice with its status, amounts, and dates, with filters for narrowing to whatever you are chasing. Use it when you need invoice-level detail.
  • The invoice tracker arranges those same invoices on a kanban board across Overdue, Sent, Pending, and Paid, sortable by due date or invoice value. Use it to see the shape of your receivables at a glance.
  • Collections rolls everything up by customer instead of by invoice. One row per customer, sorted by their oldest overdue invoice, with Collections Agent status, total overdue, and total outstanding alongside. Use it to decide which accounts to work first.

The Collections tab is where you work with the Collections Agent and run the rest of the collections workflows, like sending a one-off email or pausing dunning for a customer.

Activity logs show what has happened on a receivable. There is an activity log on the invoice and an activity log on the customer, each listing emails, payments, reminders, and agent actions in order. Use them to work out why an invoice is still open. The Collections Agent uses this context too.

The Aging Report buckets outstanding balances by how overdue they are. Average Days to Pay measures how long fully paid invoices took to settle, in aggregate and by customer, which is how you spot habitually slow accounts. Cash Forecasting projects when open invoices are likely to convert to cash.

Following up

Once an invoice is out, Tabs handles the follow-up.

Dunning sequences run on their own. Configure yours under Settings → Dunning schedule, where you choose which days reminders go out before and after the due date, plus an optional step that repeats on a set interval once an invoice is past due.

One-off reminders can be sent from the invoice tracker, from the invoice itself, or from the customer collections page. Tabs generates customer insights for you to draw on, and the agent drafts the initial copy based on the current state of the account, which you can edit before sending.

Collections Agent

The Collections Agent watches your customer accounts for events that would otherwise land on you, like an inbound email or a failed payment, and proposes the actions most likely to get you paid faster. It works at the customer level, reasoning across every invoice, email, and payment on the account at once.

It also runs AP portal automation, submitting and tracking invoices for customers who only accept them through their own portal.

See Collections Agent for setup, triage, permissions, and the full list of actions it can take.

Explore collections

Collections Agent

The agent that triages inbound email and proposes what to do next on every account.

AP Portal Automation

Submitting and tracking invoices for customers who only accept them through a portal.