Hire an AR analyst. Hand it to a collections agency. Buy an enterprise platform built for $100M+ companies. Here’s how each one stacks up against running Tally.
Hire AR analyst $90k+/yr · 1 FTE | Collections agency 25–35% of recovered | HighRadius / Versapay $90–200k/yr Year 1 | Tally $495–1,995/mo flat | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | ||||
| Year-one all-in cost (for $5M B2B) | $90k–$130k | $30k–$80k (var) | $90k–$200k | $5,940–$23,940 |
| Take of recovered cash | — | 25–35% | — | 0% |
| Setup / activation fee | Recruiter + onboarding | Setup waived | $15–40k | $0 |
| Time | ||||
| Time to live | 6–12 weeks | 1–2 weeks | 3–6 months | 30 min · live on demo call |
| Validation period before sending | Probation | None | Pilot phase | 2 weeks read-only |
| Customer experience | ||||
| Email voice | Their voice | Generic template | Templates | Yours (tuned) |
| Customer relationship stays with you | — | |||
| Payment confirmation loop | — | — | — | |
| Ask Tally chat (exec + sales) | — | — | — | |
| Escalation | ||||
| Certified-mail demand letter | Manual | Included | Manual | Included unlimited |
| Attorney demand letter (when needed) | $750–1,500/letter | Bundled in % | Add-on | $300/letter passthrough |
| Recovery team | — | Included in % | Add-on | Flat per case |
| Control & reversibility | ||||
| Approve / cancel every send | Workflow needed | — | Workflow | |
| Reversible (you can stop tomorrow) | Hard (severance, handoff) | Burned relationships | Months of work | 1 click |
| Customer data stays in your stack | — | |||
| Where the team works | ||||
| Lives in Slack | — | — | — | |
| Dashboard required for daily use | — | — | — | |
| QuickBooks / Stripe / Bill.com / Mercury integration | Manual | QBO only | All major | All major |
A good AR analyst earns $75–95k base. Add benefits, recruiting, and onboarding and you’re at $130k all-in before they’re productive. They’re great until they leave, and AR analysts turn over fast. Tally costs roughly 5% of that, runs in Slack from day one, and doesn’t go on PTO. The honest tradeoff: an analyst handles nuance Tally won’t (yet): odd disputes, complex multi-currency reconciliations, relationship-sensitive calls. Most $1M–$25M companies don’t actually need the analyst; they need the work done.
Pick Tally if you can’t justify $130k for AR. Pick an analyst if AR is dense, custom, and worth a dedicated person.
Agencies are paid on contingency: 25–35% of recovered cash on B2B, often more on smaller balances. The economics only work if the relationship is dead. Once a balance hits a collections agency, you’ve told the customer the relationship is over. Tally is built to recover the cash without burning the relationship: emails come from your domain, in your voice, with a counsel cascade that escalates predictably. When it’s genuinely dead, Tally hands off to partner counsel ($300 passthrough) or your in-house recovery team. Either way, no 30% cut.
Pick Tally if you still want the customer. Pick an agency for genuinely dead-on-arrival balances.
The enterprise AR platforms are excellent, and built for a different company than yours. HighRadius targets $100M+ revenue. Versapay’s sweet spot is $500M–$25B+. Year-one cost runs $90k–$200k+ with a 3–6 month implementation and a dedicated controller leading the project. They unlock real value at scale: multi-entity GL routing, deep ERP integration, dispute-management workflows for 5+ AR staff. If you’re a $50M+ business with that team, look at them. If you’re $1M–$25M with one finance person, Tally ships in 30 minutes and costs 1/20th of what they cost.
Pick Tally if you’re $1M–$25M and want to be live by Friday. Pick HighRadius/Versapay if you have a controller, an AR team, and a Q3 implementation budget.
The default for most B2B founders is “I’ll get to it Sunday.” Then they don’t. The bookkeeper closes the books accurately but doesn’t chase. $300–500k sits outstanding. DSO climbs. The cost isn’t a line item: it’s the cash that’s in your customer’s account instead of yours. Even if Tally only catches 30% of what doing-nothing leaves on the table, the math works on the first $5k recovery.
Pick Tally if a 30-min setup and $495/mo could move $30k of past-due cash. (It does, for most teams in our ICP.)
Cost ranges are sourced from public pricing pages, industry rate guides, and Vendr/G2 deal data as of 2026. Competitor names are used for comparison only and are not endorsements. Every claim about Tally on this page is something the team is on the line for. If any of it’s off, email jesse@tally.io.
30-min setup · 2 weeks read-only · Founder on every demo.