Our accounts receivable has ballooned to over ninety days outstanding because our account managers hate asking clients for money and our finance department claims it is a sales relationship issue. Nobody wants this collections seat on our Accountability Chart. How do we assign ownership of this painful seat when everyone points fingers?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When a seat is highly painful and everyone avoids it, the problem is usually a lack of structural clarity and a failure to assign a single owner. In EOS®, we do not allow shared accountability. If two or more people are responsible for a metric or a seat, then nobody is responsible.

To solve this, you must explicitly define the Accounts Receivable and Collections seat on your Accountability Chart. Stop trying to blend this function into the sales or general administrative seats. Create a dedicated seat, or a clearly defined sub-seat, with five specific roles. These roles should include invoice accuracy, timely payment follow-up, and resolving billing disputes.

Once the seat is defined, look at your existing team to see who has the GWC™ to own it. If sales owns the customer relationship and finance owns the bookkeeping, the Collections seat typically belongs under the Finance and Administration seat. When you assign this seat to a specific person in finance, they must own the collections metric on your weekly scorecard. Account managers can still help resolve relationship friction, but the finance seat owner is the single person accountable for the collections number. If no one on your current team has the Capacity or the desire to own this seat, you must hire a dedicated resource or outsource the function. You cannot leave the seat empty or let it remain shared.