Debt Collection Consulting Services

Outsourced AR management means a third-party team takes over running your receivables function, doing the actual invoicing follow-up, dunning, and collections work on your behalf, typically on contingency. Collections consulting means an expert reviews your internal process, identifies what is not working, and gives you a plan to fix it. Consulting may include training your team or redesigning your workflow, but it does not replace your team. Southwest Recovery Services offers both: consulting for companies that want to improve their internal operation, and outsourced AR management for companies that want to hand the function off entirely.

Southwest Recovery Services prices consulting engagements on a project or retainer basis. Not contingency. Project engagements are scoped and priced before the work begins. Retainer engagements are priced based on the scope of ongoing advisory work. Fees depend on the size and complexity of the engagement. Contact us to discuss your situation and receive a fee estimate, typically within 48 hours.

An AR process audit from Southwest Recovery Services covers your aging distribution, invoice-to-cash cycle, dispute handling procedures, escalation triggers, staffing model, and technology configuration. We review your dunning sequence and credit policy, interview key staff, and identify where accounts are aging out or falling out of the process. The output is a written report with findings ranked by financial impact and specific recommendations for each gap identified.

Our compliance review covers your collections-related procedures for exposure relevant to your account type. For B2B commercial collections, FDCPA does not apply. FDCPA governs consumer debt collection. However, state commercial collection laws and industry-specific regulations do apply to B2B operations, and our review addresses those. Our compliance review is an operational assessment, not a legal opinion. We recommend consulting legal counsel for questions requiring formal legal advice.

Consulting makes sense when you want to understand and fix your internal AR process rather than hand it off. Common triggers: DSO has risen and you do not know why, in-house recovery rates are low despite a staffed team, you are considering outsourcing but want to know whether internal fixes are sufficient first, or a recent audit flagged compliance gaps you need to close. If the conclusion is that outsourcing is the better answer, Southwest Recovery Services can transition you directly into an AR management program.

It depends on scope. A focused AR process audit is typically completed in a few weeks, from collecting your aging data and policy documents through staff interviews to a written report. Larger engagements that include dunning and credit policy redesign or implementation support run longer. We scope and price the timeline before the engagement starts, so you know the expected duration upfront rather than discovering it as the work unfolds.

Every consulting engagement delivers a written report. A standard engagement includes a current-state assessment with findings organized by severity, root-cause analysis for the primary performance gaps, specific recommendations with implementation steps, and a prioritized action list ranked by expected impact on DSO and recovery rates. Where applicable, we also provide revised policy drafts, dunning sequence templates, or workflow diagrams. The deliverables are yours to use and share internally.

Both, depending on what you need. The core of a consulting engagement is diagnosis and recommendations, but we also support implementation when clients want it. That can mean training your collections team, helping roll out a redesigned dunning sequence, or providing ongoing advisory support on a retainer. Consulting does not replace your team the way outsourced AR management does. It equips your existing team to run a better internal process.

We run active collection programs across commercial industries every day, from our Addison headquarters and offices in Texas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Missouri, Ohio, Florida, and Georgia. We have operated since 2004 and are a member of ACA International. That operating experience is the difference. When we audit your dunning sequence, we are comparing it to sequences we run, and when we diagnose a DSO problem, we have seen the same pattern in other companies. This is operational consulting from a firm that does the work, not theory from one that does not.