Products Used:
Company Overview
AE2S is a specialized civil/environmental consulting engineering firm that provides professional services and unique brand of extreme client service to clients in the Upper Midwest and Rocky Mountain Region.
Challenges
AE2S had a heavily manual process for handling Accounts Receivable (AR) aging. Roxann Carpenter, an accountant with AE2S, would run an aging report for any accounts that raised red flags on Deltek Vision and export the information to Excel. She would then send the report to each project manager (PM) that had a client listed on the Excel report. Roxann was part of an AR aging committee along with AE2S’ corporate attorney and Chief Financial Officer. The committee met once per month to review the report along with the Project Managers' feedback and the committee would determine the best course of action. “The whole process was very manual,” Roxann said. “There was not good tracking. If you wanted to look back at a client’s history, you had to go through all of the spreadsheets.” This manual process became more problematic as AE2S started to grow. Initially, AE2S served mostly public accounts: cities and municipalities. But they started to take on
more private clients, which involved a higher degree of risk. “Dealing with private clients, you have liens to protect your investment, and you only have a certain window for when you can file a lien. So if we don’t follow up and track our clients, we could lose our ability to file a lien to use as leverage,” said Roxann.
Why EleVia Software
Automatic Alerts
AE2S chose to implement EleVia's A/R Management & Collections (ARM) product to improve the management of AR aging. With ARM, Roxanna is able to pull batch reports on any aged AR on a weekly basis. Client managers are then alerted about clients that are again AR report. The corporate attorney also receives alerts for medium and high risk clients in order to prepare for potential action. For her monthly meeting with the AR aging committee, Roxann can generate another report that includes all aged AR and all related client manager feedback.
Easy Client Tracking
The ARM interface also simplifies viewing of a client's history; instead of sifting through various spreadsheets, the entire collection history is visible with a few clicks. ARM's easy client racking and alerting enables better overall management of AE2S' riskier clients. "With ARM, we can track clients of different risk levels and, depending on what type of client, we can tighten up their terms and have parameters established so we can put liens on if we have to.