Amos Is Getting Paid
A Story About Collecting What You've Earned
Amos Ilgenfritz has a problem.
The new product is selling. Orders are up. The team is energized. And the company is running out of cash.
Not because the business is broken. Because the customers have not paid. Eight hundred and twenty thousand dollars sitting in accounts receivable that should have already converted to cash. Forty invoices aging quietly while nobody made a single call. Three large customers carrying most of the balance, each one a different problem requiring a different solution. And a bank that has just scheduled a review with the specific kind of professional courtesy that means the meeting is not optional.
Amos has forty-five days to fix it.
In this sequel to Amos Ilgenfritz and the Ebb and Flow, Amos works through every version of the accounts receivable problem a business owner encounters. The large company with a bureaucratic AP department where nobody has any reason to pay faster. The customer who disputes every invoice because an open dispute means an open invoice. The salesperson who offered four month payment terms to close a deal without telling anyone. The seventeen smaller accounts that have never once received a phone call.
Each problem needs a different approach. Amos learns them all.
He learns how to find the person in a large organization who actually has the authority to cut a check and make a case to them that they cannot professionally refuse. He drives to a farm and sits across from a difficult customer and goes through a dispute list one item at a time until the handshake happens. He restructures how his sales team gets paid so their income is connected to the same thing his is connected to. He fires a customer that was costing the company more than it was worth. He builds a system so that none of this ever has to be fixed by hand again.
And he puts three numbers on a wall where everyone in the building can see them every morning.
Along the way the reader gets the tools Amos uses, in plain language, immediately after each chapter. How to read an AR aging report in ten minutes. How to run a credit review before the first shipment goes out. How to use a values anchor in a collections call that you are dreading. How to resolve a dispute without losing the customer. When to fire a customer and how to do it without burning the relationship you might need later. How to build an AR process that runs whether you are in the building or not.
This is not a book about accounting. It is a book about the gap between a sale and the cash in your account and what you do about it.
Plain and simple: a sale is not a sale until the customer pays. This book shows you how to make sure they do.
Includes the complete 40-point AR Playbook.