• Two or more years of hands-on accounts receivable, billing, or collections experience
• Working fluency in at least one mid-market ERP: NetSuite, Sage Intacct, Microsoft Dynamics, or QuickBooks
• Strong Excel skills, including pivot tables and lookups, for aging analysis and reconciliations
• Solid understanding of the order-to-cash cycle and basic accrual accounting
• Clear, professional written and spoken English for customer-facing collections calls and emails
• A documented track record of reducing DSO or improving collection rates
• Experience with AR automation platforms such as HighRadius, Bill.com, or Versapay
• Subscription billing exposure (Stripe Billing, Chargebee, Zuora) for SaaS environments
• Familiarity with B2B credit risk assessment and Dun and Bradstreet data
• A finance or accounting degree, or progress toward a bookkeeping or accounting certification
• Multi-entity or multi-currency AR experience for companies with international customers

If your cash is stuck in unpaid invoices, you do not have a revenue problem. You have a collections problem. When you hire an accounts receivable specialist through South, you get a pre-vetted finance professional in your own US time zone who chases down late payments, reconciles your ledger, and brings your DSO back under control. Placement takes two to four weeks, with no large upfront fees and 30 to 60 percent savings versus a US hire.

What Is an Accounts Receivable Specialist

An accounts receivable specialist is a finance professional who manages the money owed to your company by customers. They issue invoices, apply incoming payments, reconcile the AR ledger, chase overdue accounts, and report on metrics like days sales outstanding. The role exists to convert revenue into cash quickly and accurately.

That sounds simple until you watch what happens when nobody owns it. Invoices go out late or with the wrong PO number. Payments hit the bank but never get applied to the right account, so your aging report shows balances that were paid weeks ago. Customers who would have paid on a reminder simply do not get one. Within a couple of quarters your days sales outstanding creeps from 35 days to 60, and a company doing 10 million in annual revenue is suddenly carrying an extra 700,000 in working capital it cannot touch. That is the cost of an empty AR seat.

A strong accounts receivable specialist closes that gap. On the front end, they make sure invoices are accurate, sent on time, and matched to the customer's purchase order and contract terms so there is no excuse for delay. They run cash application daily, matching remittances to open invoices in your ERP, including the messy cases where a customer pays three invoices with one wire and short-pays a fourth over a disputed line item. They own the dunning process, a structured cadence of reminders that escalates from a friendly note at day 5 to a firmer call at day 45, and they know how to keep that pressure professional so you do not lose the customer relationship while you collect.

They also produce the numbers leadership actually needs. A good AR specialist gives you a clean weekly aging report, a DSO trend, a cash collection forecast, and a clear list of the accounts that need executive intervention. They flag bad debt early instead of letting it surprise you at year end. In a subscription business they coordinate with revenue operations on failed credit card charges and involuntary churn. In professional services they tie collections to project milestones and billing schedules.

The best people in this role are part accountant, part diplomat. They are precise enough to reconcile to the penny and personable enough to call a CFO at a customer and ask for a payment without burning the account. That combination is exactly what gets diluted when US salaries push you toward either an overqualified controller doing clerical work or an underqualified clerk who cannot have the hard conversations. Hiring the role directly, at the right level, in your time zone, solves both problems.

When Should You Hire an Accounts Receivable Specialist

Hire when receivables stop being something one person can handle on the side. The clearest trigger is volume: once you are pushing more than a few hundred invoices a month, cash application and collections become a full-time job, and asking your bookkeeper or staff accountant to squeeze it in means something gets dropped. Usually it is collections, because chasing money is the least pleasant task and the easiest to defer.

The second trigger is a rising DSO. If your days sales outstanding is climbing quarter over quarter and you cannot point to a single dedicated owner of collections, that trend will not reverse on its own. A specialist whose entire job is keeping cash moving will pay for themselves many times over in freed-up working capital.

The third is a clean-up situation. Maybe you just closed a funding round and diligence revealed a messy aging report full of stale balances nobody has touched. Maybe you switched ERPs and the migration left thousands in unapplied cash. A dedicated AR person can untangle that far faster than a generalist working around it.

Who should not hire yet: if you invoice a handful of customers a month on net-15 terms and they pay reliably, you do not need a dedicated AR specialist. Your bookkeeper or a part-time finance contractor can cover it. Likewise, if your real bottleneck is that your invoicing process itself is broken, or your contracts have vague payment terms, fix the process first. An AR specialist makes a functioning order-to-cash cycle run faster; they cannot single-handedly compensate for a billing system that produces wrong invoices. And if you are pre-revenue or running on usage that auto-charges to credit cards with near-zero failures, your need is closer to a billing specialist than a collections-focused AR role.

What to Look For When You Hire

Start with evidence that they have actually moved a number. Anyone can list "managed AR" on a resume. You want the candidate who says "I inherited an aging report with 40 percent of balances past 60 days and got it under 15 percent in two quarters" and can explain exactly how. Press on the how. The strong answer involves a specific dunning cadence, prioritizing the largest balances, and partnering with sales to unstick disputes, not just sending more emails.

Test their ERP depth, not just their familiarity. There is a real difference between someone who has clicked through NetSuite and someone who can build a saved search for unapplied payments, run a cash application against a complex remittance, and reconcile the AR subledger to the GL without help. Have them walk through a reconciliation out loud. The ones who know it will reach for specifics immediately.

Probe the diplomacy. Collections is a relationship job. Ask how they handle a customer who is 90 days late but represents 20 percent of your revenue. You want someone who escalates thoughtfully, loops in the account owner, and protects the relationship while still getting paid. Someone who answers "I'd put them on credit hold immediately" without considering the commercial impact is too blunt for the role.

Check their precision under volume. Cash application errors compound. A specialist who applies payments to the wrong invoices creates phantom aging that takes hours to unwind. Look for evidence of careful, systematic work and a habit of reconciling frequently rather than letting messes accumulate.

Who should not hire yet, restated as a hiring caution: do not hire a controller-level candidate for a clerical AR seat. They will be bored, underused, and expensive, and they will leave. Match the level to the work. A capable mid-level AR specialist who genuinely enjoys the rhythm of collections will outperform an overqualified hire who sees the role as beneath them. If you genuinely need someone to also own the broader close, you are hiring a financial controller or an accounts payable specialist plus AR coverage, and you should scope it that way honestly.

Interview Questions

• "Walk me through your dunning cadence. At what aging buckets do you escalate, and how does the message change?" Tell: specific day thresholds and tone shifts, not a vague "I follow up regularly."
• "A customer wires one payment covering three invoices and short-pays a fourth over a disputed line. What do you do?" Tell: applies what is clearly owed, opens a documented dispute on the remainder, loops in the account owner. Does not just sit on the whole payment.
• "How do you reconcile the AR subledger to the general ledger, and what causes the most common variances?" Tell: names unapplied cash, timing differences, and manual journal entries. Has a repeatable process.
• "Tell me about a time you reduced DSO. What was the starting point and what specifically moved it?" Tell: a real number, a clear method, and an honest account of what worked and what did not.
• "How do you decide which past-due accounts to chase first when you have 200 of them?" Tell: prioritizes by dollar value and risk, not chronological order. Understands the 80/20 of collections.
• "A high-revenue customer is 75 days late and getting defensive on calls. How do you handle it?" Tell: protects the relationship, escalates internally, finds the real blocker. Not purely punitive.
• "What AR metrics do you report weekly, and who reads them?" Tell: aging, DSO, CEI, cash forecast. Understands the audience is leadership making working-capital decisions.
• "Show me how you would build an aging report from raw ledger data in Excel." Tell: comfortable with pivots, date math, and bucketing. Not lost without a canned ERP report.

Salary and Cost: US vs Latin America

In the US, a competent accounts receivable specialist runs roughly 4,000 to 5,500 dollars a month in base salary, call it 4,500 as a midpoint, before you add payroll taxes, benefits, and overhead that typically push the loaded cost 25 to 40 percent higher. In high-cost metros like New York or San Francisco, you can pay well above that and still struggle to keep the seat filled, because AR is rarely the role ambitious local candidates want to stay in long term.

Through South, an equally qualified accounts receivable specialist based in Latin America typically costs around 2,100 dollars a month, a savings of roughly 53 percent. That is not a quality tradeoff. The savings come from cost-of-living and currency differences in markets like Colombia, Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil, not from hiring less capable people. The candidates we place have the same ERP fluency and collections track record you would demand from a US hire.

The math gets more compelling when you account for working capital. A specialist who pulls your DSO down by even 10 days at a company doing 10 million in revenue frees up roughly 275,000 in cash. Against a fully loaded annual cost in the low 30,000s, the return is not close. You are paying clerical-tier money for a function that directly improves your cash position.

There are no large upfront fees with South. You are not paying a 20 to 30 percent of salary placement fee to a traditional recruiter. You pay a straightforward monthly rate, you own the relationship with the person, and if it is not working you are not locked into a sunk recruiting cost. Compared to a US staffing agency or a per-hour BPO arrangement, hiring a dedicated, full-time AR specialist through South is both cheaper and structurally cleaner.

Why Hire an Accounts Receivable Specialist from Latin America

Time zone is the whole game in AR, and Latin America wins it outright. Collections is real-time work. Your specialist needs to call a customer's AP department during US business hours, respond to a disputed invoice while the account owner is still online, and join your weekly cash meeting live. A specialist in Bogota, Mexico City, or Buenos Aires works your hours, not a 12-hour-offset schedule where every collections email waits a full day for a reply. That overlap alone makes LatAm a better fit than offshore options in Asia for this particular role.

The talent pool is deep and underpriced. Latin America has a large, well-trained finance and accounting workforce, much of it fluent in English and experienced with the exact ERPs US mid-market companies run: NetSuite, Sage Intacct, QuickBooks. Many candidates have worked for US companies or US-owned shared service centers, so they already understand US GAAP basics, US customer norms, and the cadence of a US close. You are not training someone on how American business works; they already know.

English proficiency is strong in the markets South recruits from, which matters enormously for a customer-facing collections role. Your specialist is writing dunning emails to US controllers and getting on the phone with US AP teams. Clear, professional, accent-neutral written and spoken English is non-negotiable, and the candidates we vet meet that bar.

Finally, retention tends to be better. For a skilled LatAm finance professional, a stable, full-time role with a US company at a competitive local wage is a genuinely good job worth keeping. You see less of the churn that plagues AR seats in expensive US markets, where the role is often treated as a stepping stone. Lower turnover means institutional knowledge stays in the seat, and your aging report stays clean.

How South Helps You Hire an Accounts Receivable Specialist

South recruits, vets, and places full-time accounts receivable specialists from across Latin America with US companies that want the role done right without paying US clerical premiums. We screen for the two things that actually matter in AR: technical precision in your ERP and the relationship judgment to collect without damaging accounts. Every candidate we send has been tested on real reconciliation and collections scenarios, not just interviewed.

You tell us your stack, your invoice volume, your aging situation, and what "good" looks like for your finance team. We come back with a short list of pre-vetted candidates who fit, usually within days. You interview the ones you like, you make the final call, and you own the relationship directly. The person is your full-time team member, not a faceless resource rotating through a BPO queue. Placement typically takes two to four weeks from kickoff to start date.

There are no large upfront fees and no recruiting commission baked into a salary multiplier. You get a dedicated, time-zone-aligned finance professional at 30 to 60 percent less than a comparable US hire, and you get the working-capital improvement that comes with finally having someone who owns your cash collection end to end.

If your DSO is creeping, your aging report is a mess, or your bookkeeper is drowning in collections they were never meant to own, the fix is a dedicated specialist. Book a call with South and we will show you vetted accounts receivable candidates who can start cleaning up your receivables within the month.

FAQ

How much does it cost to hire an accounts receivable specialist through South?

A full-time AR specialist through South runs about $2,100 per month, versus roughly $4,500 for a comparable US hire, around 53% in savings with no large upfront fee. You get dedicated collections and invoicing support without the US payroll load.

Will a South accounts receivable specialist work in my time zone?

Yes. South places AR specialists across Latin America who overlap US business hours, so collections calls, invoicing, and month-end close happen in real time with your finance team and customers.

What does an accounts receivable specialist do day to day?

They issue invoices, apply cash, chase past-due accounts, reconcile the AR ledger, manage collections outreach, and report on DSO and aging. Strong AR specialists keep DSO low and the aging report clean without straining customer relationships.

What systems should an accounts receivable specialist know?

Look for fluency in an ERP or accounting system such as NetSuite, QuickBooks, or Sage, plus AR automation tools like HighRadius or Bill.com and strong Excel. Experience with three-way matching and cash application is a plus.

How fast can South place an accounts receivable specialist?

Most placements close in about two to four weeks. South pre-vets for accounting accuracy, collections experience, and English fluency, so you review a short, qualified list rather than sourcing yourself.

Are South's accounts receivable specialists full-time or freelance?

Full-time and dedicated. South does not place gig workers. Your AR specialist is a long-term member of your finance team, which matters for consistency in collections and clean books.