How Pettus Workplace Solutions Decreased 60+ Days Past Due Amounts by 96% With Kolleno

Pettus Workplace Solutions, based in Little Rock, Arkansas, supplies office products, janitorial products, and furniture to businesses across the region, built on a reputation for reliability and customer-first service under President Josh Pettus.

As the client base and transaction volume grew, the finance side of the business hadn’t kept pace, still running on the same spreadsheets that worked at a smaller scale.

Pettus ran collections out of an Excel spreadsheet, with two accounting employees juggling both payables and receivables by hand. “We were working off an Excel spreadsheet to manage receivables, and if you forgot something, you just missed it,” says Josh Pettus, President. As the client list grew, that dependence on memory got expensive: two full-time people were tied up keeping the spreadsheet current, and even then, tasks slipped through instead of freeing up time for growth or customer service.

With no central place to see collections activity, answering a simple question, like who owed the most or which invoices were aging, meant a manual deep dive every time. There was no way to see the full picture at a glance, which meant Pettus was always reacting to overdue invoices instead of getting ahead of them.

Kolleno checked every box Pettus was looking for: automated communication, real-time reporting, and one dashboard for the whole collections process. “Once we realized that Kolleno could automate our entire collections process, it was the obvious choice out of all the options we’d researched,” says Pettus. Automated sequences now send friendly reminders, overdue notices, and escalation emails based on invoice status, due date, and customer profile, without losing the personal tone Pettus is known for. “The automated email feature is hands down my favorite,” Pettus says. “It took something that was painful and made it effortless. Now I know that every customer is being followed up with automatically and nothing gets missed.”

Reporting used to mean digging through spreadsheets and building aging reports by hand. Now Pettus pulls reports on aging buckets, overdue invoices, promises to pay, and collected amounts in a few clicks, with dashboards updating automatically as payments come in. For the first time, Pettus could track days sales outstanding in real time and catch a problem while it was still small, using the same reports for daily collections work and quarterly board meetings.

Everything that used to be scattered across spreadsheets, email threads, and accounting notes now lives in one dashboard: top debtors, aging buckets, open promises to pay, and collected amounts against target, all in real time. Instead of reacting to overdue invoices after the fact, the team can spot risk and prioritize follow-ups before it becomes a problem.

Overdue invoices are down 50%. Median days to pay dropped from 60 days to 24, a 60% improvement. And the amount overdue by more than 60 days fell 96%.

The operational shift was just as significant: Pettus now needs two fewer accounting roles for collections, without giving up service quality. Collections went from a reactive, dreaded task to something the team runs with the same precision as sales and service. “We’re not just collecting faster, we’re operating smarter at every level,” Pettus says.