Accounts receivable payable management — invoices out, suppliers paid, cash flowing.

It's the money your customers owe you for invoices already issued or revenue already earned. Day to day that means watching invoice accuracy, due dates, customer ageing, collection notes, receipts, credit notes, disputed invoices and write-off review. Get receivable control right and a UAE SME turns sales into cash — instead of carrying old invoices that look profitable on paper but won't pay the payroll, VAT, rent or suppliers.

The flip side — money you owe to suppliers, landlords, service providers and other vendors for bills you've already received. Good payable management is bill capture, approval status, due-date tracking, supplier statement reconciliation, payment runs, disputed-balance notes and cash prioritisation. Done well it keeps suppliers happy while quietly stopping the duplicate payments, missed bills and cash leakage that creep up on most SMEs.

Receivable is money coming in from customers; payable is money going out to suppliers. You manage them together because together they drive working capital — and if receivables are slow while payables are due now, you can hit a cash squeeze even when the P&L looks perfectly healthy.

At its simplest, you debit accounts receivable and credit revenue or sales, with VAT handled according to the transaction. When the customer pays, you debit cash or bank and credit accounts receivable. The part we care about is the backup — every entry sitting on a real invoice, receipt, credit note and allocation, not floating loose in the ledger.

Mirror image: a supplier bill debits the expense or asset account and credits accounts payable, with VAT off the tax invoice. Pay the supplier and you debit accounts payable, credit bank. When we review these, we're hunting for duplicate bills, bills allocated to the wrong vendor, missing credit notes and balances no one can support.

We can prepare the overdue lists, collection notes, reminder drafts and priority follow-up schedule, and we'll make direct customer contact too if you want — that's agreed separately to fit your relationship style and approval process. In practice, most owners prefer us to keep the tracker and draft the message while their own team sends it under the company name.

Yes. The payment-run schedule lays out due date, supplier balance, bank position, expected customer receipts, disputed amounts and payment priority — so you approve from a clear picture instead of paying whichever vendor chased the loudest this week.

Yes. AR/AP management works best when connected to monthly bookkeeping because the same ledgers feed VAT returns, management accounts, audit schedules and cash-flow planning. If receivables and payables are managed outside the accounting system, reports quickly become outdated and no one trusts the balance.

Yes. We reconcile supplier statements against the ledger to identify missing bills, duplicate entries, unallocated payments, credit notes, short payments and disputed balances. Supplier statement reconciliation is useful before large payment runs, year-end audits, supplier negotiations and any case where the vendor balance does not match your accounts.

Yes. We reconcile customer statements, invoices, receipts, credit notes and unapplied amounts so the business knows what is genuinely collectible. This helps clear old receivable balances, identify disputed invoices and support collection follow-up with evidence instead of guesswork.

AR/AP is the base of a short-term cash forecast. Expected customer receipts become inflows, supplier due dates become outflows, and disputed or overdue items are adjusted for realistic timing. When AR/AP is updated weekly, management can see whether payroll, VAT, rent, loan repayments and supplier commitments are covered before cash pressure becomes urgent.

Owners can receive customer ageing, supplier ageing, overdue invoice lists, promised payment dates, upcoming payment runs, disputed balance schedules, old credit-note summaries, DSO movement and working-capital commentary. The point is action: who should be chased, who should be paid, what is blocked and what affects cash this month.

Yes. Old AR/AP balances are common when receipts were not allocated correctly, credit notes were missed, supplier payments were posted to the wrong vendor or historic invoices were duplicated. We review old balances, request supporting documents, recommend corrections and prepare a clean schedule of what is collectible, payable, disputed or ready for management write-off approval.

Yes. We can manage AR/AP inside Zoho Books, QuickBooks, Odoo, Tally or a controlled spreadsheet where the business has not moved fully into software. Accounts payable management software helps only when the underlying process is clear: invoice capture, approval, due date, allocation, payment evidence and reconciliation.

Auditors usually test receivable recoverability, supplier completeness, statement reconciliation, subsequent receipts, subsequent payments, old balances, credit notes and cut-off around year-end. If AR/AP records are not clean, the audit team asks more questions and may propose provisions or reclassifications. Regular AR/AP management creates the evidence before year-end fieldwork starts.

Bookkeeping records invoices, bills, receipts, payments and reconciliations. AR/AP management goes further by turning those records into action: who owes money, who must be paid, what is overdue, what is disputed, what can wait and what will affect cash this week. It is the difference between a ledger that is updated and a ledger that actively manages working capital.

For a UAE SME, accounts payable outsourcing services usually cover supplier bill capture and coding, three-way matching against the purchase order and goods-received note, approval routing, due-date tracking, supplier statement reconciliation and a weekly payment run you approve before any cash leaves the bank. Outsourcing the routine payable procedures frees your team from data entry while keeping payment authorisation firmly in-house, which is the control most owners want to protect.

Good accounts receivable procedures follow a fixed order: raise a compliant tax invoice the day work is delivered, confirm the customer received it, run an ageing report on a set day each week, send scheduled reminders at 7, 21 and 45 days overdue, log every promised-payment date and dispute, escalate anything past 60 days, and provision or write off what genuinely will not be collected. Writing the steps down as a repeatable procedure — rather than chasing on memory — is what actually pulls days-sales-outstanding down.

For most SMEs doing 30 or more invoices a month with receivables above roughly AED 200k, yes. The recovered founder hours, the fewer late-payment penalties and the 15 to 30 days typically taken off the cash-conversion cycle usually outweigh a fixed monthly retainer several times over. Below that volume, a tidy accounting tool with a disciplined weekly routine may be enough — and we'll tell you honestly if that's your situation.

Accounts receivable management is the end-to-end discipline of turning invoices into cash: issuing compliant tax invoices promptly, setting credit limits, running a fixed reminder cadence, tracking the aging report weekly, resolving disputes and escalating genuine defaulters. Done well it shortens DSO by weeks without a single awkward owner-to-owner phone call — the process does the chasing, on schedule, in writing.

The full procure-to-pay back office: supplier onboarding and TRN checks, invoice capture, three-way matching against POs and goods receipts, approval routing, a weekly payment-run proposal for your sign-off, execution and bank reconciliation, plus monthly vendor statement reconciliations. You keep every approval decision; we do the processing, the matching and the paperwork behind it.

The standard formula: (accounts receivable ÷ total credit sales) × number of days in the period. If you're owed AED 300,000 and bill AED 150,000 a month on credit, DSO is about 60 days — meaning two full months of sales are sitting in other people's bank accounts. Track it monthly on a rolling basis; the direction matters more than the absolute number, and a rising DSO is the earliest honest warning of a cash squeeze.

Matching three documents before an invoice is approved for payment: the purchase order (what you agreed to buy and at what price), the goods receipt or delivery note (what actually arrived), and the supplier invoice (what you're being charged). Discrepancies get queried instead of paid. It is the single most effective AP control against duplicate payments, over-billing and fraud — and it costs process, not money.

Yes — UAE VAT law provides bad debt relief where the debt is written off in the accounts, more than six months have passed since the supply, the output VAT was accounted for, and the customer was notified of the write-off. The conditions are mechanical but the evidence has to exist, which is why our write-off process generates the notification letter and the ledger trail at the same time as the accounting entry.

Thirty days from invoice is the common written term; sixty and ninety days appear in contracting, distribution and anything touching larger groups. The gap between written terms and actual payment behaviour is where working capital dies — which is why we track DSO against contractual terms per customer and flag the accounts where the spread is widening, so credit decisions are made on evidence rather than history.

We manage the ledger side: PDC registers, deposit scheduling, matching cheques to invoices, and flagging returned cheques the day the bank reports them. A dishonoured cheque in the UAE carries civil — and in some cases criminal — consequences, and pursuing one is a legal step. We prepare the documentation trail and refer you to legal counsel for enforcement; we don't act as debt collectors or lawyers.

The mainstream UAE stack: Zoho Books, QuickBooks Online, Xero, Odoo and Tally, plus bank integrations where the bank supports feeds. If you already have a system we work inside it; if you have nothing we recommend the lightest tool that fits your volume as part of setup. The controls — matching, approval routing, aging reviews — matter far more than the logo on the software.