Dunning Management

Challenges Dunning Management addresses

Done by hand, collections means gathering overdue invoices and dunning policy, working through 3 separate passes over the same material, then producing the sequence, dunning plan and needs a decision. None of it is difficult and all of it is exacting, which is the combination people are worst at holding. The errors that matter are the ones a tired reader does not notice, and they surface later — in a reconciliation, or in somebody’s reply. It comes round again every monday at 09:00, whether or not anyone has the time. As volume grows the work does not get harder, only longer, and the first thing to go is the checking.

Dunning Management runs that same sequence end to end and returns the result as structured artefacts. What it cannot settle it hands over rather than guesses at, and your correction is kept: it asks “Were these the right stages?” after every run, and those answers become the set it is measured against. Nothing that moves money, alters a contract or reaches a customer executes without human approval, and every action is written to an audit log. The gain is in the volume that no longer has to be read, not in removing the judgement.

How it works

Step 1: Placing each account in the sequence

First of 3. It works from overdue invoices and dunning policy and feeds the step after it.

Key Tasks:

• Working from the run so far: This step takes overdue invoices and dunning policy and carries it toward step 2.
• Following the same rules each time: The behaviour is configuration rather than judgement made fresh per run, so collections is handled the same way every time.
• Surfacing what it cannot settle: Anything ambiguous is passed on as ambiguous rather than resolved silently.

Outcome:

• Passed on: The result passes to the next step, with anything unresolved carried forward as an open item rather than dropped.

Step 2: Writing the escalation handover

Step 2 of 3. It takes what step 1 produced and hands its result to step 3.

Key Tasks:

• Separating exception from noise: Only what falls outside the agreed position for collections is raised. A list that flags everything is the same as a list that flags nothing.
• Attaching severity: Each item carries how far outside it sits, so a queue can be worked in the order that matters rather than in the order it arrived.
• Saying what would resolve it: Every flag names the specific thing that would clear it — a value to confirm, a record to locate, an approval to obtain.

Outcome:

• Nothing outside tolerance: The run reports clean, which is itself the result rather than an absence of one.
• Exceptions found: They are listed with severity and the action that would resolve each. None of them is acted on automatically.

Step 3: Preparing the handover for collections

Last of 3. It takes what step 2 produced and produces the sequence and dunning plan.

Key Tasks:

• Writing from the run, not from a template: The text is built from what this run actually found, so two collections outputs differ where the underlying records differ.
• Leading with what needs a decision: The exceptions come first and the routine detail follows, because the reader is deciding rather than reading.
• Staying inside the evidence: Nothing appears in the text that is not supported by a record the run examined. Gaps are stated as gaps.

Outcome:

• Draft ready: It is held for approval. Nothing reaches a customer, a calendar or a channel until a person releases it.
• Not enough to write from: It says so instead of producing something plausible from thin evidence, which is the failure that is hardest to catch on review.

Step 4: Your review, and what it changes

The run ends with a person, not with a result being filed.

Key Tasks:

• Asking a specific question: It asks “Were these the right stages?” rather than for a rating. A question about this run is answerable; a score out of five is not.
• Keeping the correction: What you change is recorded against the case that produced it, so the disagreement is retrievable rather than absorbed.
• Building the evaluation set: Those cases become what the agent is measured on. It is scored against your judgement rather than against a general benchmark.

Outcome:

• A measured agent, not an assumed one: The cases Dunning Management handles well and the cases it does not are both visible, and the second list is the one that decides what changes. Nothing is retrained silently on the back of a single correction.

Why use Dunning Management?

• Nothing leaves without approval: Handover to collections is drafted and held. A person releases them, so the agent's reach ends at your own review step.
• A batch is one run, not a hundred: It works the whole set in a single pass and returns a row per item with its verdict, so the volume that needs no attention never has to be opened.
• Reads your systems directly: It queries the connected system under scoped, read-only credentials. Nobody exports a spreadsheet first, which is the step where data goes stale.
• Runs without being remembered: It starts every monday at 09:00, on its own. The work stops depending on whoever used to carry it in their calendar.
• Corrected by the people using it: After each run it asks “Were these the right stages?”. Those answers become the evaluation set, which means it is measured against your judgement rather than ours.