ROI and Business Case

[YourCompany.com] · Finance Department · Prepared by FullSpec · [Today's Date]

This document sets out the full financial case for automating your accounts receivable chasing process. It shows what the current manual approach is costing in staff time and money, what changes after the AR Chase Agent takes over the routine work, and how quickly the investment pays for itself. The numbers are drawn directly from your process mapping session and are based on a bookkeeper rate of $40/hour and approximately 60 invoices per month. Use this document to make a confident go or no-go decision before build begins.

01What the current process is costing you

The three highest-friction steps in your current process each carry a measurable time cost and a recurring failure mode that compounds the problem over time.

• Cross-Check Previous Reminders (20 min per session): The bookkeeper manually checks the Gmail sent folder and a Google Sheets log to reconstruct which clients have been chased and how many times. Because the log is maintained by hand, it is often incomplete or out of date, meaning time is spent second-guessing records rather than acting on them. This is a confirmed bottleneck and the single largest source of duplicated effort.
• Monitor for Client Replies (15 min per session, repeated across the day): Replies, promises to pay, and partial payment notifications arrive in a shared inbox and must be read, interpreted, and manually entered into the tracker. Because this requires multiple inbox passes each day, interruptions are frequent and the status of any given invoice can lag by hours or more.
• Escalate Seriously Overdue Accounts (20 min per instance, Finance Manager time): When an invoice passes 60 days, someone must notice it, compile the chase history, and brief the Finance Manager. Because the trigger is manual and depends on whoever happens to look at the report, escalations routinely happen too late, allowing aged debt to worsen before action is taken.

02What changes after automation

After the AR Chase Agent is live, the daily grind of pulling reports, cross-checking logs, drafting emails, and reconciling payments is handled entirely by the automation on a fixed schedule. The agent polls Xero every morning, selects the correct reminder tier for each overdue invoice, sends the email via Gmail, writes a timestamped row to the Google Sheets tracker, and posts a Slack alert when an account crosses the 60-day threshold. The one decision that stays with your team is the escalation review: a Finance Manager sees a formatted Slack alert and decides whether to involve a debt collector or legal notice. Everything else runs without anyone touching it.

03Before and after comparison

04Tool costs

05Net ROI summary

06Assumptions log

These numbers are based on the inputs gathered during your process mapping session and FullSpec benchmark data from comparable finance automation builds. They are conservative by design. If your invoice volume grows beyond 60 per month, the time saving scales proportionally because the agent handles each additional invoice at zero marginal labour cost. Similarly, if your bookkeeper rate is higher than $40/hour, the annual saving increases directly with that rate. For example, at $50/hour the annual staff saving rises to $10,500 and the payback period shortens to under three months. If you are already paying for a higher tier of the workflow automation tool for other processes, the $660 annual cost shown here may already be covered, reducing incremental spend to zero beyond the build fee. The FullSpec team will rerun these figures with your confirmed inputs before build begins if any of the session assumptions need updating.