Credit On The Go

About Credit On The Go

Practical discussions of Credit & Collection topics with an eye to the future tradecredit.substack.com (https://tradecredit.substack.com/s/credit-on-the-go?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

David Schmidt

Category

business · business

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

4 Mar 2025

Latest episode

6 Nov 2026

Latest episodes

48 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   6 Nov 2026

   Agentic AI in Shared Services: Beyond the Hype, Toward Real Returns

   The AI pitch is compelling. The executive questions are tougher: What will actually improve? Who owns the outcome? And when will the investment pay off? On this Credit on the Go Podcast, TCLM’s Bob Shultz discusses these very same questions with Heather King, Managing Director of the Shared Services and Outsourcing Network (SSON). For leaders responsible for order-to-cash, shared services, or global business services, those questions anchor my latest conversation with Heather King, Managing Director of the Shared Services and Outsourcing Network (SSON). Heather returns to the podcast with a candid assessment: agentic AI is having a major impact on the conversation, but its impact on operations remains uneven. The organizations making progress aren’t necessarily the ones with the flashiest technology. They’re the ones that understand their processes, have a firm grasp of their data, and establish clear ownership and governance. One theme ties our discussion together: orchestration. Strip away the buzzword, and it means getting people, systems, AI agents, and service providers working together across the entire process, not simply making individual tasks faster. For order-to-cash leaders, that raises a familiar challenge: who sees the full journey, addresses the breakdowns between functions, and takes responsibility for the final result? Smarter decisions start here. Subscribe to Trade Credit & Liquidity Management for expert insights, strategies, and updates on the evolving quote-to-cash landscape. In this episode, we explore: * Why process readiness and reliable data matter more than an ambitious list of AI use cases. * Where human judgment and accountability fit alongside digital workers. * Why a focused implementation may offer a better route to ROI than launching dozens of initiatives at once. * How outcome-based provider pricing—and a practical hybrid approach—can help align incentives around measurable improvements. This isn’t a conversation about buying the next shiny tool. It’s about the leadership, discipline, and cross-functional coordination needed to turn technological promise into operating results. Tune in to the conversation for a grounded look at what it takes to move beyond AI enthusiasm and make the investment work. Did you enjoy this podcast? Then why not share it with a colleague? Check Out this Related Content: About Our Guest: Heather King is the Managing Director of the Shared Services and Outsourcing Network (SSON). Her mission is to deliver unforgettable events from start to finish. Her passion and expertise lie in managing the production and marketing of events and digital content. She can be reached at: heather.king@ssonetwork.com (mailto:Heather.King@ssonetwork.com) (mailto:Heather.King@ssonetwork.com) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tradecredit.substack.com/subscribe (https://tradecredit.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

2. 

   9 Oct 2026

   Payment Deductions: Stop the Leakage, Not Just the Backlog

   A customer short-pays an invoice. Your team retrieves the backup, investigates the claim, chases an internal approval, and eventually clears the balance. But has anyone fixed the problem that caused the deduction…or will the same issue generate another hundred claims next month, and the month after? In this rebroadcast of the May 22, 2025, Credit on the Go Podcast, TCLM’s Bob Shultz speaks with Jessica Butler, founder and principal of the Attain Consulting Group, about moving deduction management beyond clearing transactions to preventing avoidable losses. Drawing on more than 25 years of helping companies manage deductions, chargebacks, and short payments, Butler offers a practical roadmap for finance executives responsible for order-to-cash performance. Smarter decisions start here. Subscribe to Trade Credit & Liquidity Management for expert insights, strategies, and updates on the evolving quote-to-cash landscape. The Starting Point The fact is that disputes and deductions are taken for a variety of reasons. They are not one undifferentiated backlog. They are a window into chronic process breakdowns, system glitches, or staff training opportunities. In some cases, they can be driven by a customer working the system to delay making a payment. Each driving issue requires a specific corrective action. For example: Valid trade-promotion deductions need fast validation and resolution. Shortages, pricing discrepancies, late deliveries, and other compliance claims need a different approach, one that identifies invalid charges, addresses underlying process failures, and prevents repeat deductions. Reliable reason codes and historical data help determine where to focus. The conversation explores several choices that directly affect workload, profitability, and customer relationships: * Accountability: Deduction management cannot sit with finance alone. It is a cross-functional business issue. Sales, customer service, and operations all influence the outcome. Butler explains why a concise monthly dashboard (showing major deduction categories, aging, invalid claims, and underlying responsibility) can engage senior management more effectively than a lengthy report. * Write-offs: Automatic thresholds can reduce low-value processing, but they should not make small deductions disappear from scrutiny. Periodic reviews of grouped write-offs can reveal recurring errors, recoverable claims, or customers repeatedly deducting amounts at the threshold. * Automation: Before selecting a solution, measure where the team spends its time. Butler finds that retrieving supporting documentation often consumes much of the workday, leaving little time for analysis. Automating document collection and reason-code assignment can help redirect that effort. * AI: Beyond extracting information, AI can use historical outcomes to help distinguish likely valid deductions from likely invalid ones. That creates an opportunity to prioritize disputes with recovery potential while reducing unnecessary research on claims likely to be valid. Butler’s closing advice is deliberately manageable: start with one troublesome customer or deduction category, make a measurable improvement, and build from there. For executives facing a persistent backlog, this episode reframes the objective: not simply to process deductions faster, but to reduce preventable claims, protect the bottom line, and make the process work better for customers and employees alike. Removing one root cause can eliminate unnecessary costs, wasted time on repeated reworks, delays, the erosion of customer satisfaction, and your company’s competitiveness. Did you enjoy this podcast? Then why not share it with a colleague? Check Out this Related Content: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tradecredit.substack.com/subscribe (https://tradecredit.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

3. 

   25 Sept 2026

   The Time-to-Cash Imperative: Removing Working Capital Friction

   Revenue may be growing, but growth does not automatically translate into available cash. In this episode of the Credit on the Go podcast, TCLM’s Bob Shultz speaks with Henry Ijams, founder of StreamTech Advisors, about the operational frictions that slow the conversion of a sale into cash, and what finance leaders can do about them. Ijams brings a rare combination of commercial-lending, financial-operations consulting, research, and fintech experience, including leadership roles at PayStream Advisors, AvidXchange, Paymerang, and Corpay. His central question is deceptively simple: What keeps businesses from getting paid? The answer reaches well beyond collections. Their conversation examines why liquidity is increasingly essential not just to fund daily operations, but to absorb surprises, preserve borrowing capacity, and give companies strategic flexibility. They explore the many places cash can become “stuck” after a sale: in disconnected systems, invoice disputes, deduction processes, fulfillment and acceptance requirements, inventory cycles, and handoffs among sales, operations, billing, credit, and collections. Among the practical ideas discussed: * Looking beyond a headline DSO figure to identify what is actually driving delayed cash. * Creating a “cash held hostage” list of the largest overdue invoices and tracing the history behind each one. * Using data, and potentially accessible AI tools, to identify recurring causes of late payment. * Building shared goals with sales, operations, procurement, and other upstream stakeholders rather than treating collections as a standalone function. * Assigning ownership, tracking progress, and focusing cross-functional teams on the issues that can release the most working capital. This is a useful conversation for CFOs, treasurers, controllers, credit executives, collections leaders, and anyone responsible for converting profitable sales into reliable cash flow. The central takeaway: improving liquidity is a team sport, and greater transparency into the entire time-to-cash cycle is where the work begins. Did you enjoy this podcast? Then why not share it with a colleague? About Our Guest: Henry Ijams (https://www.linkedin.com/in/henryijams/) has spent his career at the intersection of financial operations and technology: from commercial lending at Citibank to founding research and advisory firm PayStream Advisors, covering financial operations automation and B2B payments, to product management and product marketing leadership at three of the largest billing and payment technology companies (Paymentus, AvidXchange, Paymerang, and Corpay), to launching Streamtech Advisors (https://streamtechadvisors.com/), where he provides advisory work for operators who need to fix their financial operations, and GTM consulting for the fintechs selling to them. He can be reached at henry@streamtechadvisors.com (mailto:henry@streamtechadvisors.com). Related Content: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tradecredit.substack.com/subscribe (https://tradecredit.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

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