The receivables balance nobody could explain, and the 19 checks behind it.

1 The situation

A receivables balance had grown that nobody could explain. Billing lived in two systems. The customer paid by paper checks sent in the mail. The accounting system held no invoice-level detail for this customer, and the customer's own records did not match ours.

When a balance like that sits for long enough, the usual answer is to write some of it off and move on. We were asked to find out what was actually in it.

2 What we did

We rebuilt the whole receivables ledger for this customer from raw exports, more than 1,000 orders, line by line. Then we set 18 months of our billing against the customer's own payables export.

106 of 106 invoices matched to the penny. That one result changed the question. The billing had never been the problem, so the missing money had to be on the payment side.

We then went through the bank data and proved which specific checks had never been deposited.

3 What we found

The customer had been mailing checks to a wrong remittance address for months. 19 checks, about $23K in total, never arrived.

We prepared a void-and-reissue list and walked the customer's payables team through it by email. There were no disputes. They had the same evidence we did, and their team became an ally in fixing it.

4Four more things the rebuild turned up

• A payment that had been sitting unapplied in the bank for 8 months.
• A cancelled order that was still being billed.
• Duplicate billing coming from a legacy system.
• A tax-refund check hiding inside a deposit nobody could identify.

5What the AI did, and what people did