Collections & Receivables
Collections & Receivables
Collections starts the moment an invoice is sent. Tabs tracks what each customer owes, sends follow-ups on schedule, and runs an agent that proposes what to do next on every account.
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 Agent rolls everything up by customer instead of by invoice. One row per customer, sorted by their oldest overdue invoice, with total overdue and total outstanding alongside. Use it to decide which accounts to work first.
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 and reports average days to pay. 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 manually, from the invoice tracker or from the invoice itself. 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
It monitors your customer accounts for anything that needs a response, like a failed payment or an inbound email. Each time one lands, it gathers the context it needs and proposes the actions most likely to get you paid faster. That might mean replying to a customer, updating a billing contact, applying a transaction to an invoice, or scheduling a follow-up.
The agent works at the customer level. Every invoice, email, payment, and past action for a customer sits together, and the agent reasons across all of it.
Before you start
The Collections Agent requires a billing email to work. Set up an email group, or use an existing billing-specific domain, that the agent can send from and receive to. Follow the steps in Custom email domain setup to configure it properly.
Once that is in place, the agent can send from that address and can receive customer email beyond replies to a specific invoice or dunning reminder. Any email arriving at the group is something the agent can work on, as long as Tabs can be certain which customer it belongs to.
How inbound email is matched to a customer
A reply to an email Tabs sent is matched automatically, because the thread already belongs to a customer.
A brand new email is matched by scanning the thread for an address that is a customer’s primary billing contact. This means primary billing contact addresses must be unique across your entire Tabs account. If ap@customer.com is the primary billing contact for Customer A and also a CC contact on Customer B, Tabs cannot determine which customer a new inbound email belongs to, and the agent will not pick it up.
Triaging agent work
Open Collections Agent in the sidebar. The table you land on is where you triage agent work.
Every customer with at least one sent invoice gets a row, and the row stays there from then on.
Status, What happened, and Agent actions all relate to the same collections event that triggered the agent, whichever is the most recent one for that customer.
The table opens filtered to Needs review and sorted by oldest overdue, so the most delinquent accounts awaiting a decision appear first. You can also filter to customers you have flagged or ones where the agent is paused.
Working a customer
Click any row to open that customer’s Collections Agent page. You can also reach it from the Collections Agent button on any sent invoice, or from the customer page under Collections Agent.
The agent summary at the top explains the agent’s thinking in three parts: the trigger that woke it up, the key facts it thinks you need, and its recommendation. Alongside it, Outstanding invoices lists every open invoice for that customer.
Actions
Each trigger the agent responds to produces a plan, which is the set of actions it wants to take in response.
This tab shows the events that informed the plan, with the resulting actions listed beneath them. One action can sit under several events. A payment failure and an inbound email might together inform a single proposed email draft, and both are shown above it.
For each action you can edit its details, approve it, or reject it. Editing covers whatever the action carries: the body of a draft email, the PO number being written, the prompt on a scheduled reminder. Email drafts open in the context of their thread, so you can read the conversation, revise the copy, save it, then approve and send.
Activity
The full history of the account in chronological order, newest first: inbound and outbound emails interleaved with collections events.
Click any email to read the thread. Emails Tabs sent also carry delivery data per recipient (delivered, opened, clicked, and bounced), and any attachments appear as pills you can open. When a draft is awaiting review, the activity log flags the email it belongs to, and you can approve and send it from there.
Scheduled
Pending scheduled reminders and the date each one fires.
Flagging and pausing
Flag a customer with a reason to mark them for attention, much like starring an email. Flags and their reasons are visible to the agent on later runs, so you can use the flag reason to add additional context.
Pause tells the agent to leave a customer alone entirely. Pausing cancels that customer’s scheduled reminders and any open proposed actions. Resume whenever you want.
What actions the agent can take
Attachments. The agent can attach the invoice PDF, any contract tied to the invoices in question, and any document you have configured under Invoice documents in billing settings, such as a W-9. It selects documents by their title, so name them for what they are. Call your W-9 “W9”. A vague or misleading title means the agent cannot reliably find the right file.
Scheduled reminders let the agent defer work. When the reminder fires, the agent reads the prompt it wrote for itself, re-examines the account as it stands that day, and plans again. This is how promises to pay get tracked. A customer says the wire goes out on the 15th, and the agent schedules itself to check on the 15th.
Applying a transaction depends on cash application. The agent can only apply a transaction that Tabs has already matched to one of that customer’s invoices.
Permissions
Every action asks for your approval by default. In Collections Agent settings you can change any action to:
- Always allow, meaning the agent performs it without asking
- Never allow, meaning the agent cannot use it and will not propose it
Auto-execution is decided for the whole plan rather than action by action. A plan only runs on its own when every action inside it is set to Always allow.
For example, a customer emails asking you to update their PO number. That request produces a plan holding one action, Update PO number. With that action set to Always allow, the plan runs without you.
Now suppose the same email also mentions a wire they already sent, and Tabs has matched that transaction to the invoice. The plan now holds two actions: Update PO number and Apply a transaction. If applying transactions still requires approval, nothing in that plan auto-executes, including the PO update, because one action in the plan is waiting on you.
You can still approve the actions individually.
Brand tone
Also in Collections Agent settings, brand tone is free-text instruction for how the agent should write. Whatever you put there is loaded into context whenever it drafts an email, so you can set your voice once instead of editing every message.
How the agent works
- A trigger fires. Inbound email is the most common. Cash application events also count, such as a transaction being matched to an invoice, applied to one, or excluded, as does a scheduled reminder coming due.
- The agent researches. It reads everything in Tabs about that customer: invoices, payment history, contacts, contracts, and the full email history.
- It proposes or executes work based on your permissions.
Each new trigger produces a fresh plan built on everything known at that moment. When several emails land on the same thread, each one re-plans with the full conversation in view, so the proposal in front of you always reflects the latest message rather than an early one. Anything already executed stays executed.
The agent also recognizes when you are the one emailing on a thread, based on your email domain. It treats you as a user rather than a customer, uses what you say and do as context for its plans, will not contradict something you have already told the customer, and will not repeat work you have already handled yourself.
Related resources
- Custom email domain setup. Required before the Collections Agent can send or receive.
- Receivables Reports. Aging report and average days to pay.
- Cash Forecasting. Projected collections over time.
- Payments & Integrations. Recording payments and cash application.
- Review outstanding collections. Identify overdue invoices via the API.
- Match payments to invoices. Reconcile bank transactions to open invoices via the API.