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Accounts Receivable AI ROI Calculator

Collections is two costs at once, the hours a person spends chasing invoices, and the cash that sits unpaid while they do it. This page prices both. Set the reminder volume and your hourly cost below, then your DSO in the second block.

The calculator opens with 1,500 collections touches a month across reminders, statement requests and dispute triage, 6 minutes each for a person at 35 euros an hour, against a model reading the invoice and the thread (1,500 input, 300 output tokens) with a person checking three out of ten before they go out, and a 14,000 euro representative build. The DSO block below it is separate. Enter your invoiced revenue, your current DSO and the days you expect to cut, and it shows the cash released and what that cash costs you today.

Your numbers

Task
10020,000
€
€800€8,000

With taxes and overhead the hour costs €16.25.

Advanced · minutes per task, build, hosting, tokens
min
190
€
€1,000€30,000
€
€0€1,000
1008,000
503,000
min
130
[01]/right now

Since you opened this page, the task has cost

A person€0.0009 a second
since you opened this page
An hour€3.34
A day€80
A month€2,438
Claude Sonnet 5.5€0.0001 a second
same task, checking included
An hour€0.43
A day€10
A month€314
[02]/a working day

The same day, two ways

At 1,500 reminders a month, that is 72 a working day. A person spends 6 minutes on each.

A person, one square is one reminder0.9 working days every day
9:0013:0017:00
The model, the same 72 reminders7 min of compute, 43 min of a person checking
9:0013:0017:00

Each square is one reminder. The gold sliver is the model writing all 72 answers, about 6 seconds each. The hatched part is the person reading 30 of every 100 before they go out.

[03]/a year

Twelve months, the build paid once

The build pays for itself in 57 days. After that every month keeps €2,124. Twelve months, €21,486.

A personThe modelThe build
€0€2k€3k€5k123456789101112month →build paid off · 57 days
[04]/who still reads the answers

Out of 100 answers, how many does a person read?

Click a square. This is the honest number in the whole calculation, and it costs more than the model does.

30of 100 read by a person
Checking, per reminder€0.16
Checking, a year€2,925
Ten more answers add+€975 a year
Hours of reading a year180 h
[05]/which model

Honestly, it barely matters

Seven models at list price, per reminder with the same checking. Cheapest to dearest, the whole price list fits in €0.0129. The SaaS agent billed per resolution is 5.2× away.

With Claude Sonnet 5.5 the tokens are €0.0066 of the €0.17 per reminder. The rest is the person reading. Pick the model for quality, decide the checking for cost.

[06]/how we count

Your inputs and published prices. Nothing else.

Person per reminder = 6 min / 60 × €16.25 = €1.63
Model per reminder = (1,500 × €1.84 + 300 × €9.20) / 1M × 1.2 = €0.0066
Checking per reminder = 30% × 2 min / 60 × €16.25 = €0.16
Saving in year one = (1,500 × (€1.63 − €0.17) − €60) × 12 − €4,000 = €21,486
All formulas, model prices and task defaults

Every formula with your values

Person per reminder = 6 min / 60 × €16.25 = €1.63
Model per reminder = (1,500 × €1.84 + 300 × €9.20) / 1M × 1.2 = €0.0066
Checking per reminder = 30% × 2 min / 60 × €16.25 = €0.16
Saving in year one = (1,500 × (€1.63 − €0.17) − €60) × 12 − €4,000 = €21,486
Payback = €4,000 / €2,124 a month = 57 days
Break-even volume = (€4,000 / 12 + €60) / (€1.63 − €0.17) = 271 a month

Published list prices, USD per million tokens

Prices as of 2026-10-21. Copied from the vendors' pricing pages on that date. Check the linked page before you sign anything.

ModelInputOutputSource
Claude Haiku 5.5Anthropic$0.1$0.5Pricing page ↗
Claude Sonnet 5.5Anthropic$2$10Pricing page ↗
Claude Opus 5.5Anthropic$4$20Pricing page ↗
Gemini 3.8 FlashGoogle$0.75$3.75Pricing page ↗
Gemini 3.1 ProGoogle$2$12Pricing page ↗
GPT-6 LunaOpenAI$0.1$0.5Pricing page ↗
GPT-6 SolOpenAI$2$10Pricing page ↗
Intercom Fin (per resolution)SaaS, per resolution$0.99 / taskPricing page ↗

What each task assumes

TaskMinutesTokens in / outCheckedBuildSaving a year
Support ticket reply81,200 / 40020% × 3 min€4,500€90,641
IT request (reset, access)12900 / 30015% × 2 min€5,000€51,222
Lead research and qualification152,500 / 60030% × 4 min€3,500€31,543
Sales email or proposal draft403,000 / 1,200100% × 8 min€3,000€27,408
Invoice parsing and entry62,000 / 50025% × 2 min€6,000€46,547
Email classification and routing2600 / 1005% × 1 min€2,500€47,247
RFP / security questionnaire answer254,000 / 80060% × 6 min€5,000€8,148
Payment reminder and collections touch61,500 / 30030% × 2 min€4,000€21,486
Your own task101,500 / 50030% × 3 min€4,000€24,749

Working estimates from projects delivered in 2025 and 2026, not benchmarks. Every number is editable above. The saving uses your salary, currency and model.

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Days sales outstanding

What a shorter DSO is worth

The calculator above prices the reminders. This block prices the cash that arrives earlier. Enter your own numbers; nothing here is assumed.

€ / month
days
days
%
New DSO48 days
Cash released€115,068
Financing saved per year€9,205

Daily revenue: €500,000 × 12 / 365 = €16,438

Cash released: €16,438 × 7 = €115,068

Financing saved: €115,068 × 8% = €9,205

Cash released is working capital you stop financing, not profit. Use the yearly financing saving in the business case and the cash figure when liquidity is the constraint.

What AI actually automates in accounts receivable

Collections is a sequence of small, repeated, well-documented touches, which is exactly what a model does well. A first build usually covers:

  • 01Reminder sequences written per customer, with tone, language and the exact invoice details pulled from your ERP, sent on the schedule you set and stopped the moment payment lands.
  • 02Dispute triage, where the reply that says the price is wrong, the goods never arrived or the PO number is missing gets classified and routed to the right person with the invoice attached.
  • 03Remittance matching, where payments that arrive without a reference are matched to open invoices by amount, customer and date, with the uncertain ones queued for a person.
  • 04Promise-to-pay tracking, so a customer who says Friday gets a note on Friday instead of a generic reminder on the next cycle.
  • 05The aging report as a conversation about which accounts moved past 60 days this week, who has not answered twice, where the exposure is concentrated.

Realistic ranges to expect

The per-touch saving is the easy part. A reminder written and checked by a model costs cents against a few euros of a person's time, and the calculator shows it per reminder, per month and per year. The DSO effect is where the money is and where the honesty matters. The calculator does not assume a reduction, so enter your own. Teams that go from ad hoc chasing to a consistent sequence usually see single-digit days, and the published benchmarks below say most AI users report six days or more. Put in a conservative number first and see what one day is worth.

Cash released is working capital you no longer have to finance, and it does not count as profit. The yearly saving in the block is that cash times your cost of capital, which is the number a CFO will accept. If you are cash constrained, the released amount itself is the argument.

What the research says

Dated, sourced numbers on DSO and AI in receivables, vendor-published where noted:

In October 2025 Wakefield Research, in a study commissioned by Billtrust of 500 finance decision makers at North American companies with revenue over 250 million dollars, found that 99 percent of companies using AI in receivables had reduced their average DSO, with 75 percent reporting a reduction of six days or more.

Billtrust and Wakefield Research, 23 October 2025 ↗

Billtrust's 2026 benchmark report, published in March 2026, put its clients' average DSO at 39 days in 2025, six days better than 2024, and cited Allianz Research's 2025 figure of a global DSO around 50 to 54 days, with 44 percent of companies above 60 days.

Billtrust, 2026 Accounts Receivable Benchmark Report, 23 March 2026 ↗

MIT's Project NANDA reported in July 2025 that about 50 percent of enterprise GenAI budgets go to sales and marketing while the highest measured returns come from back-office automation such as document processing, exactly where receivables work sits.

MIT NANDA, The GenAI Divide, July 2025 ↗

How to read the result

Two numbers, two audiences. The per-reminder cost is for the operations lead, because it shows the team stops writing the same email 1,500 times a month. The DSO block is for finance, because it turns days into cash. Present them separately, since the second one depends on an assumption you make. Both benchmarks above come from a vendor of AR software, so treat six days as the optimistic edge and defend your case with a smaller number.

Accounts receivable ROI questions

01Will customers know a model wrote the reminder?

The reminder goes out from your mailbox in your tone with the real invoice details, and a person reads the share you set before it leaves. Customers see a consistent, polite, well-timed sequence. That consistency is what moves DSO, not the wording.

02Which systems does this connect to?

Anything that exposes invoices and payments through an API: Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, Microsoft Dynamics, SAP Business One, Odoo, or a bank statement export. Reminders go through your existing mailbox so replies land where they always did.

03How do I pick the DSO reduction to enter?

Start from your own aging report: how many days late is the typical invoice that eventually pays without a dispute? A consistent sequence usually recovers part of that. Enter a third of it as the conservative case and the whole of it as the goal.

04What does a collections automation project cost?

Reminder sequences on one mailbox and one accounting system start around 4,000 euros; the task default assumes 14,000 euros for a fuller build with dispute triage and remittance matching. The figure is fixed in writing after a free scoping call.