Your ERP knows the invoice. It has no idea which car it belongs to
Credit management in automotive & leasing
In leasing, an unpaid invoice is rarely about the money. It's about a disputed damage assessment, a contested penalty charge, or a guarantor with four contracts who just received four separate dunning letters. Your ERP sees invoices. Onguard sees contracts, assets, and the people behind them. That's the difference between a credit team buried in Excel and one that's actually in control.
In a nutshell
Onguard is a purpose-built credit management platform used by leasing companies across the Netherlands and Belgium to automate collections, manage contract-level disputes, and handle the complexity of guarantor structures that ERP systems cannot process. Where SAP and other ERP systems work with flat invoice logic, leasing is contract- and asset-driven: the real data lives in operational lease platforms like Miles and CALMS, not in the financial system. Onguard acts as the intelligent layer above both, pulling contract data, licence plate records, and financial information into one cockpit. Leasing companies using Onguard automate 80-85% of their collections workflow, reduce DSO by 30%, cut collections costs by 15-30%, and scale their portfolio without adding headcount. Onguard has 33 years of domain expertise in receivables management and an average client retention of more than 10 years.
Your choice is the same as theirs
Four contracts. Four letters. One very frustrated customer.
Why leasing credit management breaks down
Here's a Monday morning your credit team knows well.
A fleet customer holds four lease contracts. One invoice is overdue. Your ERP fires four individual dunning letters to the same person. The customer calls, confused, having received four near-identical communications for what they consider a single relationship. Your credit manager now has a customer service problem on top of an overdue payment.
It is a structural problem built into how ERP systems process lease portfolios. Invoice-driven, with no concept of a guarantor, no awareness that four invoices belong to one person, and no understanding that the reason for non-payment might be a disputed scratch on a specific vehicle.
The credit manager fills that gap with Excel: every Monday, downloading open items from SAP, pulling contract data from Miles or CALMS, doing VLOOKUPs to match the financial truth with the operational truth. By the time the picture is complete, half the week is gone.
The lease portfolio has changed. The systems haven't kept up.
Fleet, private lease and multi-entity: one structural challenge
Fleet leasing, private lease, and multi-entity lease portfolios each carry their own complexity. The underlying gap is the same across all three.
- Fleet leasing: corporate customers hold multiple contracts across one or more legal entities. The credit manager needs to group communication at guarantor or holding level, not send one letter per invoice. Every ERP-generated communication that fragments this relationship risks damaging an account that represents significant revenue.
- Private lease: the shift from B2B to B2C lease has brought entirely new risk profiles and communication challenges. A private lease contract may carry two signatories, a couple, a business partner, or in many cases two people who are no longer on good terms. Both parties are legally responsible. Both may need to be contacted independently. Your ERP has no concept of this relationship at all.
- Multi-entity portfolios: : leasing companies that have grown through acquisition manage dozens of subsidiaries, each with its own contracts, its own SAP entity, and its own communication requirements. Consolidating the credit management operation across those entities, without a consultant involved every time a template changes, requires a layer of intelligence the ERP was never designed to provide.
The credit manager's job in leasing is not to chase invoices. It is to understand who owes what, why, and on which asset. Right now, that understanding comes from Excel.
One cockpit. Contract-level intelligence
What Onguard does for leasing & automotive credit teams
Onguard connects the financial reality of your ERP with the contract and asset reality of your lease management system in one workspace.
- Guarantor grouping: one person, one communication.
A customer with four active contracts receives one consolidated communication, not four. In private lease, Onguard runs separate communication tracks for each signatory simultaneously, without the workflows colliding. - Contract and asset-driven workflows
Disputes in leasing are about a specific vehicle, a contested damage assessment, or a residual value calculation, not money. Onguard brings the contract and asset into the collections workflow so disputes are routed and resolved in context, not chased as anonymous line items. - Recovery prioritised by residual vehicle value
Onguard sorts the recovery priority list by asset value against outstanding debt, a Scania truck or BMW fleet vehicle's current worth versus what is owed. Your team acts on the highest-risk cases first, not the oldest invoice first. - SAP and Miles/CALMS in one screen
SAP knows the invoice. Miles knows the contract, the licence plate, and the asset. Onguard pulls both into a single dossier. The VLOOKUP goes away. Your team focuses on the 15–20% of cases that need human judgment.
Onguard pulls data from both systems into a single dossier. The credit manager opens one screen and sees the financial position from SAP alongside the contract and asset detail from Miles or CALMS. The VLOOKUP goes away. The Monday morning ritual goes away. What remains is a credit team that can actually focus on the 15-20% of cases that need human judgment.
30% shorter DSO. 15-30% lower collection costs. Same team.
Measurable results in leasing portfolios
Onguard customers in transport and logistics report measurable, concrete improvements to their credit management operations.
The ROI in leasing is rarely about reducing headcount. It is about portfolio scalability. The same four-person credit team that currently manages 20% of a growing portfolio can manage 100% of it with Onguard. When acquisitions happen, when new subsidiaries are added, when private lease volumes increase, the credit operation scales with the business without proportional growth in headcount.
For the CFO: provisions for bad debt are booked directly against the profit and loss account. Faster collections and better-prioritised recovery workflows mean lower provisions. That is a balance sheet impact, not just an operational efficiency story.
30%
shorter DSO: releasing working capital at exactly the point in the cash cycle where lease portfolios need it most
15-30%
savings on cost of collections: driven by workflow automation, reduced manual data work, and faster dispute resolution.
13%
increase in sales revenue: because credit teams that resolve disputes faster protect customer relationships and reduce contract churn.
>10
years average client retention: because leasing credit managers who use Onguard do not want to return to the Excel-and-ERP combination.
Don't just take our word for it
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Onguard + ERP= Better together
How Onguard works with your ERP and lease management system
Onguard is not a replacement for your SAP or for Miles. Both remain exactly where they are.
SAP, continues to be the financial record of truth. Miles or CALMS continues to manage your contract and asset data. Onguard connects to both, reads the relevant data from each, and builds the credit management layer above them: the workflows, the guarantor grouping, the dispute management, the communication history, and the dashboards your ERP was never designed to provide.
The combination works precisely because Onguard understands what each system is for. SAP knows money. Miles knows cars. Onguard knows the credit management process that sits between the two.
What you gain by combining both:
What you gain by combining both:
| What your ERP does | What Onguard adds |
|---|---|
| Records invoices and payments | Manages disputes, documents, and communication |
| Sends one dunning letter per invoice | Sends one consolidated communication per customer |
| Stores financial totals | Surfaces contract context and asset detail in every dossier |
| Requires IT for any workflow change | Gives credit teams full self-service configuration |
| Has no concept of residual vehicle value | Prioritises recovery workflows by asset value vs. outstanding debt |
30 minutes, your lease portfolio, no slides
See it in practice
A demo takes 30 minutes. In that time, we show you exactly how Onguard connects to SAP and Miles or CALMS, how guarantor grouping works in practice, and what your credit team's Monday morning looks like when the Excel ritual stops.
A live walkthrough built around how leasing credit management actually works.
Frequently Asked Questions - Credit management for transport & logistics
Our ERP sends a separate dunning letter for each lease contract. Can Onguard consolidate these into one communication per customer?
Yes, and this is one of the most impactful things Onguard does for leasing portfolios. Onguard groups open items at guarantor level, so a customer with four active lease contracts receives one consolidated communication covering all outstanding items, regardless of how many separate invoices exist in SAP. This protects the customer relationship, reduces inbound complaints to your customer service team, and gives your credit manager a cleaner, more manageable workflow.
We manage private lease contracts where two people are jointly responsible for payment. How does Onguard handle this?
Onguard supports independent communication tracks for multiple signatories on a single contract. In private lease situations where two parties are jointly liable, such as a couple or two co-signers, Onguard can contact each party separately, with their own communication history, their own workflow, and their own follow-up cadence, without the two tracks interfering with each other. This is a leasing-specific capability that standard ERP systems do not support.
Our disputes are almost always about a specific vehicle or damage assessment, not about inability to pay. Does Onguard handle asset-level disputes?
Yes. Onguard brings contract and asset context into every debtor dossier. When a dispute is linked to a specific vehicle, a contested damage estimate, or a penalty charge, your credit manager sees that context directly in the dossier alongside the financial position. Disputes can be categorised, routed to the right internal owner, and tracked to resolution, without the credit manager needing to cross-reference Miles or CALMS manually to understand what the dispute is actually about.
We use SAP for finance and Miles for contract management. Do we need to replace either system to use Onguard?
No. Onguard is designed to work above both systems, not instead of them. SAP remains your financial record of truth. Miles continues to manage your contracts and asset data. Onguard connects to both via API and pulls the relevant data into a single workspace. Your credit team stops switching between systems and stops rebuilding the picture in Excel every week.
How does Onguard help us prioritise vehicle recovery when a customer is in serious arrears?
Onguard, configured with your consultants during implementation, can sort the recovery priority list by residual vehicle value relative to outstanding debt, rather than defaulting to oldest invoice first. This means your team focuses its recovery effort on the cases where the financial risk is highest, typically high-value vehicles with significant remaining debt, rather than working through a flat chronological list. This is not a default ERP capability and requires the contract and asset data from your lease management system to function, which is exactly what Onguard pulls in.
We have grown through acquisitions and now manage multiple lease subsidiaries across different legal entities. Can Onguard handle this
Onguard is specifically built for multi-entity environments. You can manage separate legal entities from one cockpit, with entity-specific templates, communication styles, and workflow configurations. When subsidiaries share a customer, or when a group customer holds contracts across multiple entities, Onguard handles the consolidation and routing automatically. Adding a new entity does not require a consultant or an IT project. Your credit team configures it directly.
We are growing our private lease volume significantly. Will Onguard scale with us?
This is exactly the portfolio scalability argument that drives the ROI case in leasing. The same credit team manages a proportionally larger portfolio as volume grows, because Onguard automates 80-85% of the routine workflow. Private lease adds volume and complexity simultaneously: higher invoice counts, new risk profiles, multi-signatory contracts. Onguard handles all of this without requiring additional headcount to match portfolio growth.
How does Onguard differ from the collections functionality already in SAP?
SAP's collections module operates on flat invoice logic. It sends reminders based on invoice age, amount, and payment terms. It has no concept of a guarantor structure, no awareness of the asset behind the invoice, no ability to group contracts at customer level, and no connection to your lease management data in Miles or CALMS. Onguard adds the layer that SAP is missing: contract-driven workflows, guarantor grouping, asset-context dispute management, and the ability for your credit team to configure and adjust everything themselves without routing a change request through SAP support.