Introducing Bectran Intelligence Lab — AI tools for credit, risk, and collections.
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Bectran Product Team
I
February 16, 2026
6 minutes to read
Your invoice is valid. The customer has money. They are willing to pay. And yet the balance sits, aging and growing more expensive by the day. When payment stalls not because of financial distress but because a pallet arrived damaged, a shipment came up short, or a product failed a quality check, the standard collections toolkit is useless. Dunning letters cannot fix a manufacturing defect. Statement reminders cannot locate a missing delivery. But the DSO clock continues to run, and responsibility for reducing it remains with the credit department. This playbook outlines how to identify when operations is the real source of friction and how to build a process to resolve these disputes without burning customer relationships.
Operational disputes are frequently invisible until an account is already significantly past due. Unlike a declined payment or a bankruptcy signal that Company Radar would surface in real time, an operational dispute usually starts with silence. The customer withholds payment while waiting for a resolution from another department—sales, logistics, or quality assurance—and finance only learns of it when a collector finally makes contact.
Quality defects create hard stops. When goods arrive out of spec, customers freeze the transaction. They are not refusing to pay because they cannot; they are refusing to pay because the contract was not fulfilled. At that point, the owner or controller has intervened, and no dunning sequence will release those funds. The credit manager is now dependent on the quality assurance or manufacturing team to validate the defect, issue a return authorization, or dispatch a replacement. Until that operational loop closes, the invoice stays unresolved.
Logistics failures hold entire invoices hostage. When an order arrives incomplete or days late, customers routinely withhold payment on the full invoice—even if 90% of the shipment was correct. The credit team is left with vague collector notes referencing "incorrect and/or delayed delivery," but no access to the shipping data needed to counter the claim or correct the invoice. Without visibility into carrier performance or pick-list records, there is no way to verify or dispute what the customer is reporting.
Large aging balances often signal a fulfillment issue that hasn't been confirmed yet. A reliable customer who stops responding but continues to make payments is a strong signal that something went wrong in the physical fulfillment process. The danger in this scenario is that the credit team suspects a delivery issue but cannot confirm it. While they wait for clarity, automated collctions notices keep going out—directly to a customer who has not received their goods. The relationship deteriorates from both directions.
In a well-integrated operation, a delivery failure would trigger an automatic hold on collections activity. In most B2B environments, that connection does not exist.
ERP systems typically keep modules segregated. The warehouse management system knows a shipment was short. The quality system knows an RMA was opened. But the AR module often only knows that an invoice was generated and sent. Unless someone manually updates the collections team, dunning runs on autopilot—treating a disputed invoice identically to a valid unpaid one.
When a customer raises a defect claim, the credit manager cannot write off the balance without verification. So they email the sales rep (who may be traveling), then the warehouse manager (who is on the floor), then wait for photos, proof of delivery, or contract terms on returns. This manual "verify and wait" loop adds days or weeks to resolution time. The cash stays trapped. The customer's credit limit remains in use. And new orders may be blocked as a result.
Generic dispute coding compounds the problem. When all non-payment reasons collapse into a bucket labeled "Dispute" or "Researching," it is impossible to measure how much cash is actually tied up in operational failures. You cannot build a business case to fix logistics if you cannot isolate the financial impact of logistics failures.
The credit department cannot fix a manufacturing defect or a carrier routing error. It can fix the process for handling the financial consequences of those failures.
Establish operational SLAs. Finance has internal SLAs for credit decisions. Operations need equivalent timelines for dispute resolution. Proof-of-delivery requests should include a 24-hour resolution window for logistics. Quality defect claims should require QA assessment within three business days. Shortage claims should be verified against warehouse pick lists within 48 hours. With agreed-upon timelines, the credit team can give customers a concrete resolution date rather than an open-ended "we'll look into it."
Create a distinct dispute status in your collections workflow. The moment a credible operational dispute is raised, that invoice should exit the standard dunning track. Build an "Operational Review" status in your collections workflow that pauses automated communications, assigns the dispute to a named internal owner (not just a department), and sets a follow-up date based on the agreed SLA. This prevents customers from receiving collection notices for goods they never received and places accountability where it belongs.
Correlate aging trends with order data. Proactive credit teams do not wait for customers to surface problems. If a specific carrier is consistently associated with slow payment, the issue may be delivery performance, not credit risk. If a specific product line has a high rate of short payment, the cause may be packaging or manufacturing. Analyzing payment patterns alongside operational data surfaces these hotspots early—and gives finance the data it needs to escalate with logistics or manufacturing leadership.
Getting operational disputes resolved faster does more than clear a few invoices. Every day an invoice remains in dispute, administrative costs accumulate, and the probability of recovery declines. Faster resolution preserves the original sale margin and reduces the need for blanket "goodwill credits" issued solely to smooth over a bad experience.
It also improves risk modeling accuracy. If your DSO is 55 days, but 10 of those days are due to internal shipping delays, your customer risk profile is skewed. A buyer who pays immediately upon clean delivery looks slow in your system—and may be receiving tighter credit terms as a result. Removing operational noise from the AR aging report reveals your portfolio's actual creditworthiness.
Finally, it changes how the customer experiences your finance team. Customers accept that mistakes happen. What damages relationships is when the vendor acknowledges a delivery failure in one conversation and continues sending past-due notices in the next. When the credit department pauses collections, facilitates the fix, and proactively follows up, it becomes a problem-solving partner rather than a collections function.
Audit your top 10 past-due accounts. Count how many are stalled due to defects, damages, or delivery failures rather than financial issues. The number will likely be higher than expected.
Define the internal handoff. Who specifically is responsible for approving a return authorization or verifying a short shipment? If the answer is informal, document a formal owner for each dispute type.
Implement granular reason codes. Stop using generic dispute tags. "Damaged in Transit," "Short Shipment," and "Quality Defect" are distinct issues and should not be reported or managed the same way.
Suspend automated dunning on legitimate disputes. Ensure that once an operational dispute is logged and verified, automated collections communications are paused. Sending a past-due notice to a customer waiting on a replacement shipment is not just unhelpful—it is a relationship cost that compounds with every touchpoint.
When you resolve the physical reasons behind non-payment, you do not just collect cash faster. You give the entire business a clearer picture of what is actually going wrong—and the data to fix it.
Invoices stalling over damaged goods, short shipments, or delivery disputes? Accounts aging while operations and finance wait on each other? Bectran's claims and disputes platform includes line-item dispute workflows that route each claim to the correct internal owner, automated collections suspension tied to dispute status so dunning pauses the moment a claim is logged, reason code tracking across damage, shortage, and quality categories for portfolio-level reporting, and bi-directional ERP sync so dispute status updates in Bectran are reflected in your system of record in real time—eliminating the manual update loops that cost days of resolution time. See how dispute resolution works.
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