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Comment by taylorhou | Hacker News Reader

enjoy how there's perspective given from the responders with their current MRR as well. as a founder of a bootstrapped tech-enabled service startup with $135k+ MRR is cash flow. Accounts Receivable is a PITA and it still hasn't been solved (even with the likes of bill.com, harvest, stripe, paypal, qbo, etc...) - i'd almost pay for a company to outsource our AR to completely to represent us on initial AR, 30-90 day AR, collections, demand letters, and ultimately lawsuits if needed. bleh.

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When I worked at Xero, AR automation was by far the most common partner / integration to approach us.

There are thousands of solutions in this space, focused on every niche imaginable, with a huge range of products.

Everything from simply reminders, to outsourcing, to discounting / incentives, to debt collection.

I’d be very surprised if you can’t find a suite of tools that automate / optimise the portions of your AR process that you’re having difficulties with.

https://apps.xero.com/au/function/bills-expenses (Most of these are multi-platform, or completely independent applications, they do not require using Xero)

These manual back office tasks is exactly why I hired an office manager.

She chases down invoices and handles back payments for all of our clients.

The mental overhead of handling these things was significantly hampering my technical work, and the moment she took over, a huge weight lifted off my back.

Part of the aggravation is that you can't automate chasing down invoices, yet. As a person who likes to automate all the things, this would just not do. So I sourced it out.

at that size, would it be better to just hire an in-house accounting/book-keeping person?

I was going to recommend the same thing, but I also know there are plenty of AR companies out there. YC even funded one called YayPay. I know my accountant will chase down invoices for me if I asked him (for a fee of course), thankfully QuickBooks Online handles this reporting, and has a one click solution to resend Invoices. I don't do $135k/mo, and only send a handful or two of invoices each month, so I cannot comment on how well it scales.

This exists; invoice factoring companies make this process relatively straightforward.

Invoice factoring doesn't solve the root collections issue. It's just a really expensive bandaid...

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