Identifying Churn in AR

IDEA Tech Tip

Customer churn (also known as customer attrition, turnover, or defection) is when a customer decides to stop engagement with your company.

IDEA can help easily identify “churn” in accounts receivable by following these steps:

Perform a File Compare between the current and prior year databases. A File Compare will take the detail AR from both years, summarize, and join the databases. A difference column calculating the current and prior year balances will be created automatically. To determine potential AR churn, index the field containing the number of records (NRECS_2017) for the current year in ascending order. If that customer has a balance from the previous year, then it tells us that although they have a balance in both years, the decrease in activity (NRECS_2017 vs. NRECS_2016)) suggests that customer engagement has dropped off.

Tech Tip