Virtas Partners was engaged by a PE-owned legal services firm to investigate $15 million of unapplied cash recorded in a suspense account and identify whether the cash should be remitted to customers as overpayments, applied to outstanding invoices, or credited to customer account.
Client Need
A PE owned legal services firm accumulated millions in unapplied cash over five years. The cash posting team struggled to match lockbox and credit card receipts to originating invoices due to:
- Overpayments and duplicate payments from customers
- Inconsistent or invalid payment information
- Multiple acquired billing platforms with different invoice formats and numbering schemes
- Limited team capacity to resolve exceptions manually
The result was a growing liability balance, limited visibility into customer level activity, and uncertainty around whether funds represented true overpayments,unapplied receipts, or misposted transactions. Leadership needed clarity, speed, and a scalable process.
Tailored Solutions
Virtas deployed a combined process redesign + machine learning automation approach to resolve historical issues and build a scalable monthly process:
- Conducted rapid end-to-end process mapping and presented root cause findings to the Executive team
- Built a custom Virtas powered by RapidCanvas solution to ingest and cleanse nonstandard data, harmonize formats across acquired billing systems, and matchtransactions at the individual charge level
- Reconciled thousands of historical transactions, identifying unpaid invoices, duplicate payments, insurance reimbursements, and excess cash received withoutbillings
- Designed, piloted, and implemented a monthly recurring process leveraging the Virtas powered by RapidCanvas solution to produce real-time customer-levelstatements and reconciliations
- Created an offline customer subledger and upload templates to support accurate posting in NetSuite
- Developed standardized procedures to classify refunds, overpayments, partial payments, and mismatched credits
Value to client
Virtas delivered a proprietary solution that goes far beyond traditional cash application tools:
- Handles messy, multi-platform, multi-year data that off the shelf software cannot ingest
- Learns from exceptions and adapts to client specific rules through expert-in-the-loop oversight
- Combines ai, ML automation with accounting judgment, process redesign, and data harmonization
- Produces defensible, audit ready outputs suitable for PE backed environments
- Functions as a virtual financial analyst that improves with use, rather than a static rules engine
Capabilities
- End-to-end process evaluation
- Ai and Machine Learning Solutions
- Finance function process improvement
- Data harmonization
- Technical accounting