Collections and Dunning — Controller Guide
Collections is a worst-first work queue for money customers already owe you. It takes every submitted-but-unpaid receivable, ranks each one by a deterministic payment-risk score, and drafts a tier-aware reminder email for you to review and send. The mental model: Arcvue tells you which receivables to chase first and writes the reminder — nothing leaves the building until you click send.
For: controllers and anyone chasing cash · Time: ~10 minutes · You'll need: the Accounting module, and invoices that have actually been submitted to the customer.
How to access
Accounting → Billing & Revenue → Collections, or /accounting/collections.
The page header reads AR Collections.
A lighter, copy-only version also sits behind the Collections toggle on the Invoices page. Use this full workspace when you want a send actually recorded — the toggle is for grabbing wording, not for working the queue.
Part 1 — What appears here, and what does not
This is the part that saves a support question. The queue is narrow on purpose.
An invoice must be SUBMITTED, not merely generated. Collections surfaces only invoices that have gone to the customer and are past due — roughly submitted-but-unpaid for 30 days or more. Draft, approved and paid invoices never appear. If a receivable you expect is missing, it almost always has not been submitted yet; generate and submit it on Billing & Revenue → Invoices.
Paid receivables drop off by themselves. When one is marked paid it leaves the queue automatically, so what you are looking at is genuinely open and genuinely late. You never clear this list by hand.
That combination is what makes the queue trustworthy: it cannot be padded with drafts, and it cannot be stale with things already collected.
Part 2 — Reading the page
Three cards summarize the whole queue:
| Card | What it counts |
|---|---|
| Open receivables | Total dollars outstanding across the queue |
| High-risk items | How many rows sit in the high band (carries a warning icon above zero) |
| In queue | How many receivables are in the queue at all |
Below is the ranked table, sorted worst-first. The Filter by customer or invoice… box finds one fast, and the export control pulls the current view into a spreadsheet.
| Column | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Customer | Who owes it |
| Invoice | The invoice number |
| Amount | Dollars outstanding |
| Past due | Days past due — a dash means either not yet past due, or a contract whose payment clock has not started (see below) |
| Risk | The payment-risk score and its band, e.g. 72 · high |
| Last contact | How many times you have contacted them, and the current outreach tier |
| Action | The Dunning button for that row |
Risk band and outreach tier are two different things
They are adjacent columns and easy to conflate. Risk is about the customer's likelihood of paying without a nudge. Tier is about where you are in the escalation ladder for that invoice.
| Value | Type | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| high | Risk band | Least likely to pay unprompted (rose) — work these first |
| medium | Risk band | Elevated risk (amber) |
| low | Risk band | On a predictable payment pattern (muted) |
| 1st nudge | Outreach tier | A first reminder is due |
| 2nd nudge | Outreach tier | A second is due, after the first went out |
| Escalation | Outreach tier | Past routine nudges |
| — (dash) | Outreach tier | Nothing due yet — the Dunning button is disabled. Also shown when the payment clock has not started |
So a high-risk row showing a dash is not a contradiction and not an oversight: the customer is risky, but you have already contacted them recently enough that another reminder is not yet due. The score tells you where to look; the tier tells you whether it is time.
The risk score is deterministic — the same inputs produce the same score. It is not a guess that moves under you between refreshes, which is what makes working the list top-down defensible.
Some invoices are not late yet, however old they look
On a few contracts you are the subcontractor, and payment falls due a set number of days after the prime is paid by their own customer. Arcvue cannot see that date — it happens on someone else's books — so counting from your own invoice date would make the invoice look overdue before it is.
Those rows carry a Terms contingent entry in their risk factors, worth no points, saying so in plain terms. They show a dash under Past due, they are not scored on their age, and no reminder is drafted for them. They stay in the queue because the money is real and somebody should be watching it — what is withheld is the claim that it is late.
If you know the prime has been paid, you can still write and send a reminder yourself. Arcvue declines to author a past-due claim it cannot stand behind; it does not stop you acting.
Past-due alerts, and the acknowledgment that covers the screen
Above the queue, Past-due alerts lists every sent invoice that is past its due date and what has happened about it: the customer and invoice, the due date the aging used, the days past due, the stage the alert has reached, who has been told, and who has acknowledged.
The alert goes to the person in charge of the program -- the Program Manager assigned the contract, or, where none is assigned, the lead of the division it sits in. At Division lead at (days) the lead behind an assigned manager is added; at COO at (days) the Operations Lead is added. Each person is emailed once per stage, and when they next open Arcvue a dialog covers the product until they confirm I am aware this invoice is past due and am planning to address it with the customer and press Acknowledge. The confirmation is recorded with their name and the time. A new stage asks again.
Prime due (days) is the due-date policy for receivables on prime contracts: thirty by default, whatever the award text says, because a government customer pays on the Prompt Payment clock. Receivables on contracts where you are the subcontractor age on the subcontract's own terms, and a pay-when-paid subcontract never raises an alert, for the reason given above.
A row whose Told column is empty is the thing to fix first: nobody is assigned the program, its division has no lead, and the tenant has no Operations Lead. Assign one and the next nightly evaluation addresses it. The alert closes itself when the invoice is paid or voided; the row is kept.
Part 3 — Sending a reminder
- Work top-down. The highest-risk, oldest, largest items are already at the top. That ordering is the product's opinion about where your time is worth most.
- Check the row is actionable. If the outreach tier shows a dash, Dunning is grayed out and nothing is due.
- Open Dunning and read the draft. It is written for the tier the invoice is on — a first nudge is not worded like an escalation.
- Edit it. The draft is a starting point, not a template to send blind. You know the relationship; Arcvue knows the arithmetic. The form has four fields: Recipient email (the customer's AP contact — required, and the send button stays disabled until it is filled), Reply-to (your team address — replies come back here), Subject, and Message (review before sending), which holds the drafted text you are editing.
- Send. The contact is recorded, which is what advances Last contact and the tier — so the next reminder is correctly worded and correctly timed.
Who wrote the draft
Above the form, the drawer says whose words you are reading.
- Standard wording for this tier — the fixed text every customer at that tier gets. It names the invoice, the amount and the days past due, and nothing else.
- Drafted by the model — written for this customer about this invoice, from a fixed set of facts: the invoice number, amount and date, the days past due, the contract by name, its payment terms, whether a dispute is open, and every notice already sent on it. The date it was written is shown.
Draft with the model writes a new one on demand. It is disabled when no model is configured for your tenant, and the standard wording stands.
A model draft is checked before you ever see it. It is discarded, and the standard wording kept, if it names a dollar figure or a day count that is not in those facts, if it does not name the invoice, or if it threatens legal action, interest, a late fee or a collections agency. A draft also stops standing once the tier moves or another notice goes out — the tone it was written in is no longer the tone that is due — so the standard wording returns until a new draft is written.
Every draft is recorded, and the notice you send records which draft you started from. Editing is still expected: the draft is a starting point, and the send is yours.
Nothing is sent automatically. Arcvue ranks, drafts, and records; the decision to contact a customer stays with a person.
Cancel closes the reminder without sending it. Nothing is queued and
nothing is recorded against the invoice, so backing out costs nothing.
Part 4 — When something looks wrong
"The page says it could not load the collections queue." The request failed, so the page is making no statement about what is outstanding — that is different from No outstanding receivables in the collections queue, which appears only when the queue loaded and is genuinely empty. Reload; if it keeps happening the server is not answering.
"An invoice I know is late isn't in the queue." It has almost certainly been generated but not submitted. Only submitted invoices past due appear. Check Billing & Revenue → Invoices.
"A row I collected is still showing." It has not been marked paid yet. Paid receivables leave on their own; nothing here needs manual clearing.
"The Dunning button is grayed out on a high-risk row." The outreach tier is a dash, and there are two reasons for that. Usually no reminder is due yet: high risk says chase this one first, not chase it again today. But check the risk factors for a Terms contingent entry — if it is there, the invoice may not be late at all, because the payment clock starts when the prime is paid. Confirm that has happened before chasing.
"Last contact says 2 but I only remember one email." The count includes every recorded send, including ones a colleague made from this workspace. The copy-only toggle on the Invoices page does not record a send, which is exactly why the full workspace is the one to use when it should count.
"The page says the module is unavailable." The Accounting module is not enabled for this tenant.
One-line summary
Collections ranks every submitted, past-due receivable worst-first by a deterministic payment-risk score, and drafts a reminder matched to the invoice's outreach tier. Work top-down, check the tier before you send (a dash means nothing is due, even on a high-risk row), edit the draft, and send — which records the contact and advances the tier. Paid invoices leave the queue by themselves, and nothing is ever sent without you.
Related
- Where invoices are generated and submitted → Accounts Receivable
- Aging by customer with DSO → AR Aging (
/accounting/reports/ar-aging) - Cash timing this feeds → Financial Statements