The Client
The client had recently handed off Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable to a new team member. It’s a common story: someone new steps into the role, priorities pile up elsewhere, and the day-to-day matching work falls behind. This is a problem.
Payments and credit memos were still being recorded. They just weren’t being applied to the invoices they belonged to. Not ideal. Everything was landing in a clearing account instead, which kept the books technically moving but broke the connection between what came in and what was actually being paid off. Work was done, but not correctly.
The effect showed up fast in the aging reports. Almost every invoice still looked outstanding, whether or not it had actually been paid. Suppliers who’d been settled still appeared on the AP aging. Customers who owed nothing still showed balances on the AR side. The reports were technically accurate line by line. Still, as a picture of what the business actually owed and was owed, they weren’t telling the truth anymore.
The client knew what needed to happen: clean up the backlog, then keep the process tight going forward. What they didn’t have was the time to sit down and work through it themselves.
How Protea Financial Helped
We were brought in specifically to work through the backlog, and the client needed it done quickly, on software our team hadn’t worked in before.
We got a short knowledge-transfer call and the client’s standard operating procedures, and that was enough. No lengthy ramp-up, no weeks of back-and-forth just to get oriented.
The client sent the work over in two batches. The first was the easy part: payments and credit memos that matched an open invoice dollar-for-dollar. We cleared every one of those the same day.
The second batch was harder. These didn’t line up one-to-one: payments and credit memos had to be applied oldest-to-newest, working through each account in sequence so that the right invoices stayed open and the right ones closed. Done by hand, that’s the kind of task that eats a full day and still leaves room for error.
Instead, we used AI to work through the transaction data, map out the correct oldest-to-newest matches, and produce an Excel working paper laying out exactly what should be applied where. Our team reviewed it, then processed the matching directly in the client’s accounting system the next day.
The Outcome
Results
Looking Ahead
The engagement hasn’t ended with the cleanup. It’s turned into an ongoing rhythm. The client sends through batches of transactions as they come up. Our team turns them around quickly, matching payments and credit memos before they have a chance to pile up again.
That’s really the value of catching this kind of backlog early. Once the aging reports reflect reality, they stay useful, and the client can trust the numbers they’re making decisions from instead of second-guessing them.
