Your AR team spends more time guessing than collecting

A customer pays $3,000.

You have three open invoices totaling $6000.

No reference number. No remittance advice. Just a number and a name that doesn't quite match your customer master.

Now someone has to guess:

Is this a short-pay? A deduction? A partial payment they'll clear later?

That "someone" is usually a person, cross-referencing a bank statement against an ERP export, in Excel, every single day.

DSO tracks how long an invoice stays open.

It says nothing about the hours burned just figuring out what a payment was for.

How does your team handle this? Software, spreadsheet, or tribal knowledge from whoever's been doing AR the longest?