Collection Gap

The problem with your DSO report

There's a number sitting in your AR report right now that looks fine on the surface. Your DSO is holding steady — maybe it even dropped last quarter. You put that in the CFO summary and moved on. But here's the question nobody's asking: did collections actually improve, or did you just invoice faster? Because those aren't the same thing, and your current report can't tell you which one it was.

What Collection Gap does

This skill takes your raw AR export — from QuickBooks, Sage Intacct, NetSuite, Xero, Dynamics, FreshBooks, or any custom CSV — and produces a six-tab Excel workbook built around the metric that actually explains your collections performance: the Collection Gap (DSO minus Best-Possible DSO). When that gap widens, your team has a problem. When it narrows, they fixed something. When DSO drops but the gap holds flat, the improvement was billing timing — not collections. Now you can tell the difference.

What's inside the workbook

• Executive Summary: Week-over-week movement on every key metric — DSO, BPDSO, Collection Gap, CEI, ACT, AR Turnover, % AR over 90 days.
• CFO Insights: Narrative analysis that reads below the surface — not just what changed, but what it means.
• Metrics Detail: Clean calculations, term-aware benchmarks, verified against common data pitfalls like parenthesized negatives, GL-line granularity, and ambiguous date formats.
• By-Customer Breakdown: Know exactly who's dragging the number and who's actually paying on time.
• Prioritized Overdue Queue: A real work list, scored for risk and days overdue — so your team knows who to call first, not just who owes the most.
• History Tab: Builds automatically week over week so you can see trends instead of just snapshots.

How it works

The skill runs a one-time setup interview to learn your column names, lookback window, and aging buckets. After that, every subsequent run is hands-free — drop in the new file and get back a complete workbook. It handles the data quality issues your ERP doesn't warn you about: subtotal rows, reversed payments, credit memos, partial payments, forward-dated invoices, and GL-line exports that break standard AR formulas.

Who this is for

AR managers, controllers, bookkeepers, and RevOps leads at small to mid-size companies — the person doing the work, not the person watching a presentation about it. No BI team required. No Python. No formulas to audit. Just upload, run, and send the report your CFO actually reads.