Treasury Management

Receivables and Payment Collection Solutions

Last reviewed 2024-06-01 // Commercial Treasury

Receivables and payment collection is the discipline of getting money owed to your business into your account quickly, applying it to the right invoice, and knowing about it the moment it lands. Within Synovus Gateway, the receivables solutions bring every inbound payment channel into a single online treasury workspace so that finance teams can accelerate cash inflow, shorten the collection cycle, and reduce the manual effort of matching payments to open receivables. This page explains how the collection tools in Synovus Gateway work, how they fit together, and how to use them well.

The core idea is straightforward. A business receives payments in many forms: paper checks, ACH transfers, wires, card payments, and increasingly real-time transfers. Each of those arrives through a different rail, on a different schedule, with different remittance data attached. Synovus Gateway consolidates that fragmented inflow, normalizes the remittance information, and delivers it back to you in a form your accounting system can consume. The result is faster availability of funds and cleaner books, which is the outcome Synovus Gateway is built to deliver.

Because collection touches accounting, sales, and customer service at the same time, the tools inside Synovus Gateway are designed to be operated by treasury staff without deep technical involvement. Approvers, viewers, and administrators all work from the same ledger view in Synovus Gateway, and the platform enforces separation of duties so that the person who initiates a change is not the person who approves it. That structure matters as much for collections as it does for outbound payments.

Throughout this page we focus specifically on the inbound, receivables side of Synovus Gateway. Where outbound payables, positive pay, or account reporting are relevant to collections we mention them, but the emphasis stays on how your organization receives, identifies, and posts money owed to it through Synovus Gateway.

How Payment Collection Works

Every collection begins with a payer deciding how to send you money and ends with your ledger showing that a specific invoice has been paid. Between those two points lies a chain of steps that Synovus Gateway is built to automate. Understanding that chain helps explain why some payment types clear faster than others and why remittance data is the quiet hero of the whole process inside Synovus Gateway.

Capture

Capture is the moment a payment enters a channel that Synovus Gateway can see. For a paper check that means arriving at a lockbox or being scanned through remote deposit. For an electronic payment it means the ACH batch, wire, or card transaction hitting the receiving account. The faster and more completely capture happens, the sooner the rest of the cycle can run, which is why Synovus Gateway prioritizes electronic and image-based capture wherever a payer will accept it.

Identification

Identification is matching an incoming amount to the customer and invoice it belongs to. This is where most manual collection effort historically goes, because a wire for a round number with no memo, or a check with no remittance stub, forces a person to investigate. Synovus Gateway attacks this problem by capturing structured remittance data at the point of collection and carrying it through to your reporting, so that a payment arrives already tagged with the account and invoice numbers it should clear.

Posting and availability

Posting is when the funds are credited and, depending on the channel, made available for use. Availability schedules differ: wires and real-time payments are effectively immediate, ACH credits settle on their scheduled date, and check deposits follow standard availability rules. Synovus Gateway surfaces these timelines transparently so your team knows not just that a payment was received but when the cash can actually be deployed.

Feedback to the ledger

The final step returns the enriched transaction to your accounting or ERP system. Synovus Gateway produces standardized output files and reports that carry the remittance detail collected upstream, which means the same identification work done once inside Synovus Gateway does not have to be repeated by hand in your books. This closed loop, from capture through posting to ledger feedback, is what turns a pile of raw deposits into clean, applied cash within Synovus Gateway.

Collection Channels in Synovus Gateway

A well-run receivables operation almost never relies on a single channel. Different customers prefer different ways to pay, and each channel trades speed against cost and remittance richness. Synovus Gateway supports the full range so that you can offer payers convenient options while still consolidating the results in one place.

Lockbox

Lockbox remains the workhorse for businesses that still receive meaningful check volume. Payers mail checks to a dedicated address, the payments are opened, imaged, and deposited, and the remittance documents are captured alongside them. Synovus Gateway delivers those images and extracted data electronically, which removes mail float and manual handling from your own back office. For companies with recurring billing and paper-heavy customers, lockbox through Synovus Gateway is often the single largest lever on days sales outstanding.

ACH collections

ACH is the low-cost electronic backbone of recurring collections. With the right authorizations, Synovus Gateway lets you originate debits to pull funds from customers on a schedule, ideal for subscriptions, membership dues, rent, and installment billing. Because ACH carries addenda records, it can move remittance detail with the payment, feeding the identification step in Synovus Gateway automatically and keeping per-transaction cost far below card acceptance.

Card acceptance

For customers who expect to pay by card, Synovus Gateway supports card acceptance so that receivables staff can take one-time or recurring card payments and see them alongside every other channel. Card collection improves the payer experience and speeds settlement, at the cost of interchange, so most businesses use it selectively for the customers and situations where convenience justifies the fee. In Synovus Gateway those card receipts still land in the same consolidated view.

Wire and real-time

Wires and real-time payments handle high-value, time-sensitive collections where immediate finality matters. Synovus Gateway shows inbound wires as they arrive and gives treasury the information needed to identify them quickly, which is important because wires frequently arrive with sparse remittance data. Real-time rails extend that immediacy to smaller transactions, and Synovus Gateway is positioned to consolidate these newer channels next to the traditional ones.

Remote deposit

Remote deposit capture lets your own staff scan checks received at your locations and deposit them without a trip to a branch. Inside Synovus Gateway those deposits join the same reporting stream as lockbox and electronic collections, so a business with both mailed and hand-delivered checks sees a unified picture through Synovus Gateway rather than reconciling two separate systems.

Reconciliation and Cash Application

Collecting money is only half the job. The other half is applying it correctly, and this is where receivables operations either save time or bleed it. Synovus Gateway is designed to shift as much cash application as possible from manual keying to automated matching, driven by the remittance data captured at each channel.

When a payment arrives with a clean invoice reference, Synovus Gateway can pass that reference straight through to your accounting system, allowing your software to auto-apply the cash. When the reference is missing or ambiguous, Synovus Gateway still presents the payment with all available context, such as the payer name, the amount, and any imaged remittance, so a person can resolve the exception in seconds rather than minutes. The goal is a high straight-through rate with a short, clean exception queue.

Consolidated reporting is what makes reconciliation manageable across channels. Rather than logging into separate systems for lockbox, ACH, and card, treasury staff review a single view in Synovus Gateway that shows every inbound collection for the day. That single view is also what lets a controller trust the cash position, because there is no hidden pool of unposted receipts sitting in a channel nobody checked.

For businesses that run an ERP, the file feeds from Synovus Gateway matter as much as the on-screen view. Standard formats mean the enriched transaction data loads without custom middleware, and the same identification work flows into general ledger postings, subledger updates, and customer statements. With Synovus Gateway, reconciliation stops being a month-end scramble and becomes a daily, near-automatic routine.

Channel Comparison

The table below compares the main collection channels available through Synovus Gateway across the factors that most affect a receivables decision. Use it as a guide to which channel to steer each type of customer toward within Synovus Gateway.

No single row wins outright. A strong receivables strategy in Synovus Gateway usually blends a low-cost recurring rail like ACH for predictable customers, a lockbox for those who still mail checks, and card or real-time options for convenience where the margin supports the fee. The value of Synovus Gateway is that you can run all of these at once and still see one consolidated result. That is the practical reason many treasury teams standardize their inbound rails on Synovus Gateway.

Performance Metrics

Receivables performance is measurable, and the metrics below are the ones treasury teams watch most when they evaluate a collection setup. The illustrative figures show the direction a consolidated approach through Synovus Gateway is intended to move each measure. Treat them as targets to reason about rather than guaranteed results, since every business starts from a different baseline before it moves onto Synovus Gateway.

Two metrics deserve special attention. The first is days sales outstanding, the average time between billing a customer and collecting the cash. Every channel improvement in Synovus Gateway, from faster capture to cleaner application, feeds directly into a lower DSO, which frees working capital. The second is the straight-through application rate, because it captures how much human effort the collection process demands. Pushing that rate up inside Synovus Gateway is the surest way to make a receivables team more productive without adding headcount.

The shift from paper to electronic collection is the underlying driver behind all of these numbers. As customers move to ACH, card, and real-time rails, Synovus Gateway carries more structured remittance data through the pipeline, which raises straight-through rates and shrinks the exception queue at the same time. Watching the electronic share climb inside Synovus Gateway is a good proxy for the overall health of the receivables operation.

Security and Controls

Inbound money attracts fraud just as outbound money does, so the collection tools in Synovus Gateway sit inside the same control framework used across the platform. Role-based access decides who can view collections, who can originate an ACH debit, and who can adjust remittance mappings, and those roles are administered by your own entitled users of Synovus Gateway rather than by the bank.

Separation of duties is enforced structurally. In Synovus Gateway, the same user cannot both set up and approve a sensitive change, which limits the damage any single compromised credential can do. Dual approval on high-risk actions and detailed audit logging give a business the evidence trail that auditors and internal controls teams expect from Synovus Gateway.

On the fraud side, the receivables channels benefit from monitoring and, for the ACH origination that some collection models use, from tools that flag unusual activity before it settles. Synovus Gateway also supports multi-factor authentication and session controls, so access to the collection data itself is guarded, not just the transactions. For businesses that want to understand the broader threat landscape, general reporting on payments fraud from outlets such as Reuters offers useful context, though the controls that matter day to day live inside Synovus Gateway itself.

Case Study

The figures in this example are illustrative of the kind of outcome a paper-heavy business can pursue with Synovus Gateway rather than a specific published result. What generalizes is the pattern: move predictable customers to electronic rails, keep a lockbox for the rest, feed the enriched data from Synovus Gateway to your accounting system, and let the exception queue shrink on its own.

How to Get Started

Bringing your collections into Synovus Gateway is a staged process, not a single switch. The steps below outline the usual path from an initial review to a running, consolidated receivables operation on Synovus Gateway.

1. 01

   Map your current inflow. List every way customers pay you today, the volume in each channel, and where remittance data currently gets lost. This baseline tells you which Synovus Gateway channels will move the needle first.

2. 02

   Choose your channel mix. Decide which customers move to ACH, which stay on lockbox, and where card or real-time acceptance earns its cost. A treasury contact can help align the mix to your Synovus Gateway configuration.

3. 03

   Configure entitlements and approvals. Set up roles, dual-approval rules, and the users who will operate collections inside Synovus Gateway before any live payments flow.

4. 04

   Connect the ledger feed. Establish the output files that carry enriched remittance from Synovus Gateway into your accounting or ERP system, and test the auto-application before go-live.

5. 05

   Migrate in waves and measure. Move customer segments one at a time, watch the electronic share and straight-through rate, and adjust. The metrics in Synovus Gateway will show you where the next improvement lies.