Can a Staffing Firm Double Invoice Volume Without Growing the AR Team?

This customer story was prepared in June 2026. Brand references in the original interview have been updated to ReceiveUp.

The Conversation Every AR Leader Is Having

There’s a conversation that is getting repeated across staffing, it sounds something like this:

AR leader: "We need more people. The volume is too high. We're falling behind."

Leadership: "We can’t approve additional headcount."

The team at Verstela, a nationwide light industrial, manufacturing, warehouse, and technical staffing firm, was facing a similar predicament. Down a headcount, with invoice volumes rising, Toryn Jarvis’ team was feeling the pressure of effectively managing their AR while maintaining the excellent customer experience that is a hallmark of Verstela. Toryn was quickly working on a plan to fill the gaps.

"We were struggling a lot in the beginning," she says. "I told them: either give me two more people, or we're going with ReceiveUp."

What happened after that is instructive, not just for Verstela, but for any staffing firm wrestling with the same question: When volume grows but headcount can't, what do you actually do?

The Staffing AR Scaling Problem Is Real, and Broadly Shared

Before getting to what Verstela did, it helps to understand why this situation is so common.

For staffing firms managing tight margins, operational inefficiency can be costly. Every delayed invoice, every disputed payment, and every manual follow-up that falls through the cracks is extracted directly from an already compressed bottom line.

At the same time, AR teams are being asked to do more with the same or fewer resources. When administrative work crowds out strategy, the processes deserve a closer look.

The result is predictable: AR teams get buried in reactive work. Reminders pile up. Disputes get escalated. DSO creeps upward. And the team that should be (and could be) proactively building successful client billing relationships is instead sending the same invoice follow-up email to escalated accounts for the fourth time.

What Strategic Resourcing Actually Means

The phrase "strategic resourcing" gets used a lot in staffing. It usually means figuring out how to get more done with the same headcount (or less). But there is a more precise way to think about it in the context of AR.

Strategic AR resourcing means designing your team's time around work that requires human judgment and intervention, and automating everything that doesn't.

This distinction matters because not all AR work is equal. Some of it requires nuance: negotiating a payment plan with a long-standing client, training a junior analyst on escalation strategy, and building the relationship that prevents the dispute in the first place. Other work is purely mechanical: sending a reminder at Day 15, confirming receipt of an invoice, processing a payment, and following up on a past-due account with a templated email.

What Verstela Actually Did With Reclaimed Time

When Toryn's team deployed ReceiveUp, the most immediate impact was on volume. Before automation, her team members personally managed a high volume of follow-ups.

"They were collecting on over 400 invoices," Toryn says. "Now they are collecting on less than 100. All the emails and phone calls my team has to make has gone down significantly, because ReceiveUp does that reminder cadence outreach."

That is not a small shift. Moving from more than 400 manually managed invoices to fewer than 100 represents a reduction of more than 75% in invoice volume requiring hands-on attention. It does not establish an equivalent percentage reduction in time spent. So what happened to the time the team got back?

Three things, each of which goes beyond reminder emails.

1. Proactive Client Outreach

Before ReceiveUp, the Verstela AR team was overwhelmed, which pushed them to operate more reactively than they wanted to. The most on fire and overdue got attention first. Everyone and everything else waited.

"New client outreach wasn't something we really had time for," Toryn explains. "But now we can intentionally reach out to a new client and say, 'Hey, you got your first invoice this week, can you confirm the net terms are right? How are you intending to pay?”

This sounds simple, but it’s actually transformative. In staffing, the first invoice is a high-risk moment in the client relationship. If the net terms are wrong, if the invoice format doesn't match their AP requirements, if the client needs to be set up in a vendor portal, if you send it to the wrong contact, you want to know that on day one, not 31 days later when the invoice is aging.

"We can reach out to them about their invoices the week they first get it," Toryn says, "rather than find out later that they never got the invoice, or something was wrong with it. So it's also helped reduce our DSO and our collection efforts."

2. Deeper Auditing and Account Management

For Verstela's most complex AR processes, onboarding and reconciling MSPs and VMS, historically "a huge pain point" as Toryn describes, the reclaimed time has meant something different: the ability to actually audit properly.

"We're able to spend a lot more time in audits and be a lot more intentional with our work," she says. "We're able to actually onboard a lot more MSPs and VMS accounts and not feel like we're drowning all the time."

That audit capacity translates directly to revenue protection. It means catching rate discrepancies before they compound. It means onboarding new accounts correctly from the start, rather than rushing to get billing live and cleaning up the mess later.

3. Manager-Led Training and Escalation Strategy

Perhaps the most durable benefit of reclaiming AR team time is what it enables at the management level. When every non-response escalates to the manager, the manager has no capacity for anything else.

"Previously, anything that didn't get a response got passed to me," Toryn says. "Now I actually have time to work with my team, on game plans, finance fees, what to do when a client goes dark."

This matters for team development, but it also matters for outcomes. Escalated collections handled by a trained, supported team perform better than escalations handled by an overwhelmed manager triaging as fast as they can.

The DSO Impact: A Customer’s Experience

Reclaimed time is valuable. But the financial impact of AR automation is most visible in DSO.

For context, DSO measures the average number of days it takes to collect payment after a sale. Every additional day ties up cash. As an illustration, a firm with $50 million in annual credit sales and an 8% annual financing cost would incur about $164,000 in annual carrying costs for an additional 15 days of receivables, using a 365-day year. This is an illustration, not Verstela’s reported financial result.

Before ReceiveUp, Verstela was already monitoring DSO closely. But Toryn knew it could be tighter and that seasonal patterns could make it unpredictable.

"Our due-upon-receipt clients, we used to treat them more like net 30, just because we didn't have the capacity to reach out earlier than that," she explains. But now, “with the reminder cadences, we're treating them more like net 15. They get their first notice at 15 days, that gives them time to get their invoice into their system and get a payment going. It's caused a good chunk of our clients to start paying earlier."

The result: Verstela's DSO has come down, and critically, it has not followed the typical seasonal uptick pattern in Q1, when most firms see DSO climb as clients deal with year-end cash constraints.

"It hasn't really ticked up that much," Toryn says. "Hopefully that's a good trend."

As she puts it plainly: "Cash flow is everything in an organization. If we have a really high DSO, that means we have a bigger open balance of clients not paying bills, which means we have less money in our bank to pay our bills."

The Partnership Equation

One thing that doesn't show up in DSO metrics but shows up in every conversation with AR leaders: the quality of the implementation partner matters as much as the platform.

For Toryn, a major part of the ReceiveUp experience has been responsiveness, the sense that when her team identifies a need, it gets addressed.

"I feel like I'm in a constant tennis match with ReceiveUp, I want this, and they're like, 'Done.' And I'm like, 'But how about this?' So far, I haven't really been told no."

That dynamic, a technology partner that is genuinely responsive to the operational realities of the customer, is particularly important in staffing, where billing complexity is highly specific to each firm's client mix, VMS relationships, and payroll infrastructure.

"The partnership has been phenomenal," Toryn says. "They took on all the communication with our payroll platform directly, I didn't have to be the middleman relaying information back and forth. That was a big play."

What This Means If You're Evaluating Back-Office Automation

Verstela’s experience highlights the value of examining where an AR team’s time goes. If you are a staffing firm leader asking whether AR automation is worth it, the question to ask yourself is not "can we afford to automate?" It is: what is the cost of not automating?

And from Verstela: a team that went from managing 400+ invoices manually to under 100, and used the reclaimed time to build proactive client relationships, deeper account audits, and a trained, coached collections team.

As Toryn summarizes it for any peer at a staffing firm who might be skeptical:

"Even if you're just going to utilize ReceiveUp for client portal access and the reminder cadences, it's already worth it. And ReceiveUp already does much more than that."

ReceiveUp helps staffing firms simplify accounts receivable-from invoicing to collections to cash flow visibility.

If you're looking to tighten your back office without adding headcount, we'd love to talk.