How to Speed Up Statement Day at Your Lumberyard | Flitch
For most lumberyard accounting teams, statement day is the most dreaded day of the month. Printing, stuffing, mailing, chasing — the same manual process every cycle, eating up staff hours and slowing down cash flow while you wait for checks to trickle in.
It doesn't have to work this way. Here's how to cut the time and friction out of your monthly AR process.
Understand Where the Time Actually Goes
Before you can fix statement day, it helps to break down where the hours go. For most LBM dealers, the time sinks fall into a few predictable categories:
Generating and formatting statements. Pulling the right data, formatting it correctly, and making sure every customer's balance is accurate before anything goes out.
Physical distribution. Printing, stuffing envelopes, applying postage, and getting everything to the post office — a process that can take a full day for yards with large contractor account bases.
Payment collection. Waiting for checks to arrive, processing them manually, and reconciling payments against open invoices.
Following up on past-due accounts. Calling customers, leaving voicemails, sending follow-up letters, and tracking who has been contacted and when.
Each of these is a candidate for significant time reduction.
Step 1: Move from Mailed Statements to Email Delivery
The single highest-impact change most dealers can make is switching from mailed statements to emailed ones. The time savings are immediate — no printing, no stuffing, no postage, no trip to the post office. Statements go out in minutes instead of hours.
Most modern LBM software platforms support emailed statements natively. If yours doesn't, this alone is a strong reason to evaluate alternatives.
The secondary benefit is speed of receipt. A mailed statement takes days to arrive and more days to be processed. An emailed statement arrives instantly and can be acted on the same day.
Step 2: Give Customers a Way to Pay Online
Mailing a statement and waiting for a check is a two-week process at minimum. Emailing a statement with a link to pay online can compress that to same-day.
Online payment — by credit card or ACH bank transfer — removes the friction that delays collection. Contractors are busy and often not at a desk during business hours. If paying you requires a phone call or mailing a check, many will put it off. If they can tap a link on their phone and pay in 60 seconds, many will do it immediately.
The operational benefit extends beyond speed. Online payments eliminate check processing, reduce bank runs, and create a clean digital record of every transaction.
Step 3: Automate Past-Due Reminders
Manual follow-up on past-due accounts is one of the most time-consuming parts of the AR process — and one of the easiest to automate. Modern software can send scheduled reminders automatically at whatever intervals make sense for your business: 30 days, 45 days, 60 days past due.
Automated reminders are also more consistent than manual follow-up. Every past-due account gets contacted on schedule, not just the ones your team remembers to call. That consistency improves collection rates without requiring additional staff time.
Step 4: Let Customers See Their Own Account
A significant portion of the calls your accounting team fields every month are customers asking about their balance, a specific invoice, or a recent payment. Every one of those calls takes time.
A self-service customer portal — where contractors can log in, view their account history, see open invoices, and check payment status — eliminates most of those calls. Customers get answers faster, and your team gets their time back.
Step 5: Evaluate Whether Your Software Is the Bottleneck
If your current platform requires significant manual work to generate statements, doesn't support emailed delivery, can't accept online payments natively, and has no automation for past-due follow-up — the software itself is the bottleneck. Workarounds and third-party tools can patch some of these gaps, but they add complexity and don't solve the underlying problem.
Modern LBM software should make statement day routine rather than painful. If yours doesn't, it's worth taking 30 minutes to see what a platform built for today's AR workflow looks like.
One Flitch customer summed it up well after their first automated statement cycle: "I'd like to start off by saying this is the best statement day I've ever had. I love the automated statements."
That's what statement day should feel like.
