Last updated October 2026
Accounts receivable clerks in Dallas earn a median of $57,304 in 2026, and you don’t need a degree to get hired. Most people start with a high school diploma, some office experience, and working knowledge of a billing system. Here’s what the job involves, what it pays, and where it leads.
What does an accounts receivable clerk do?
An AR clerk makes sure the money a company is owed shows up. You invoice customers, apply payments, track what’s late, and chase the accounts that have gone quiet.
Day to day, that usually looks like this.
- Creating and sending customer invoices, then fixing the ones that come back disputed
- Applying payments from checks, ACH, wires, and card processors to the right accounts
- Running the aging report and working the accounts that have slipped past thirty days
- Calling and emailing customers about balances that are due
- Reconciling deposits against what the bank received
- Researching short payments, which usually means a pricing problem no one told you about
- Helping close the month by making sure receivables tie out
The Bureau of Labor Statistics files this work under bookkeeping, accounting, and auditing clerks at a national median of $50,670. Dallas AR clerks run a bit above that.
Do you need a degree to become an AR clerk?
No. A high school diploma is the standard requirement in most Dallas postings, which makes this one of the better ways into accounting without a bachelor’s.
It’s a common first accounting job for people coming out of retail, customer service, or a call center. If you’ve handled a register, worked a collections queue, or spent a year on the phone with unhappy customers, you already have most of what this job asks for. Make sure you are hitting those points on your resume.
An associate’s degree or a certificate helps, and some employers list it as preferred. It isn’t the requirement.
What’s the difference between accounts receivable and accounts payable?
AP pays the company’s bills. AR collects the company’s money. They sit on opposite sides of the same ledger and hire from the same pool of people.
| AP clerk | AR clerk | |
|---|---|---|
| Money direction | Out | In |
| Dallas median, 2026 | $55,275 | $57,304 |
| Who you deal with | Vendors | Customers |
| Hardest part | Approval chasing | Collections calls |
| Next step | AP specialist, $60,336 | AR specialist, $61,350 |
Salary source, PrideStaff Financial 2026 North Texas Salary Guide.
If you’re choosing between the two, the deciding factor is the phone. AP is mostly internal, chasing managers for approvals. AR puts you in front of customers, asking for money they haven’t sent. Some people find that energizing and some find it draining, so it’s worth knowing which one you are before you take the job.
How much do AR clerks make in Dallas?
AR clerks in Dallas earn a median of $57,304 in 2026, with most between $50,135 and $64,472 depending on industry, collections experience, and how well you know the billing software. Those figures come from our 2026 North Texas Salary Guide.
AR clerks sit slightly ahead of AP clerks at $55,275, and the reason is collections. The moment a job includes calling customers about overdue balances, the pay goes up, because that’s the part employers have trouble staffing.
You can check where your experience lands with our North Texas salary calculator.
How do you become an AR clerk with no experience?
- Learn a billing system before you apply. QuickBooks Online, NetSuite, or SAP. Employers screen on software more than on years, and free training exists for most of these.
- Translate the job you already have. Handling payments, resolving billing disputes, or working a collections queue in another industry all count. Use the words the posting uses.
- Get comfortable in Excel. Pivot tables and VLOOKUP or XLOOKUP.
- Take contract work to start. Dallas companies bring in AR help for month-end backlogs and cleanup projects, and those assignments go to people without long resumes.
- Be ready to talk about a hard conversation. Interviewers ask how you’d handle a customer who says the invoice is wrong. Have an answer.
The collections part is typically why people decide this job is not for them. You’re calling someone who owes your company money and asking when it’s coming, and some of those calls go badly. If that sounds like something you’d dread every day, AP or bookkeeping is the better direction, and that’s ok.
Which skills move you up the range?
The difference between $50,135 and $64,472 comes down to how much of the receivables process you can run on your own.
- Collections that work. Bringing down days sales outstanding is the number you put on a resume, and it’s the one hiring managers ask about.
- ERP depth. NetSuite, SAP, Oracle, or Microsoft Dynamics. Advanced Excel, Power BI, SQL, or implementation experience can command a 5% to 15% premium according to our salary guide.
- Cash application at volume. Matching hundreds of payments against invoices without creating a cleanup project for someone else.
- Deductions and disputes. Retail and consumer goods customers in DFW short-pay often, and someone who can research and resolve those is hard to replace.
- Credit review. If you can look at a new customer and have an opinion about terms, you’re operating above clerk level.
What comes after AR clerk?
- AR specialist at a median of $61,350, reachable in one to two years if you’re performing.
- AR analyst at $75,851, usually three to four years in, where the work shifts toward reporting and forecasting cash.
- Credit manager or AR supervisor, if you like the collections and terms side of it.
- Staff accountant at $79,619, which means finishing a bachelor’s while you work.
Receivables is a career on its own, and the climb from clerk to analyst happens without a degree. The ceiling arrives at the accountant level, where almost every Dallas posting asks for the bachelor’s. Worth knowing early so you can choose rather than discover it.
The clerk category is also shrinking. BLS projects bookkeeping, accounting, and auditing clerks to decline about 6% between 2025 and 2035 as software takes over the routine entry. What software doesn’t do is call a customer who’s ninety days late and work out a payment plan, so the AR people who move toward collections, disputes, and credit keep getting hired.
How do you find an AR job in Dallas?
- Put your billing system and your collections experience at the top of your resume, named specifically. Our resume builder covers the format.
- Quantify one thing. Invoice volume per month, portfolio size, how much you brought down the aging, or days sales outstanding before and after.
- Look at Carrollton, Irving, Las Colinas, and North Dallas, where distribution, logistics, and healthcare employers hire for this role steadily.
- Take temp-to-hire seriously. AR accuracy shows up within a few weeks, so it’s one of the better roles for proving yourself into a permanent seat.
- Expect a software test. Many Dallas employers will put you in front of their system and ask you to apply a payment or pull an aging report.
If you’re hiring an AR clerk in Dallas
Decide whether you’re hiring a processor or a collector, because they’re different people. Someone who applies cash cleanly and someone who’s comfortable calling a customer about a ninety-day balance rarely come in the same package at clerk level, and a posting asking for both tends to sit open.
The other thing worth doing is pricing the collections piece honestly. AR clerks who carry the collections calls run toward the top of the $50,135 to $64,472 range, and posting at the bottom of it for a job that includes the phone work is the usual reason a search stalls.
If you need accounting and finance staffing help, our Dallas team can send pre-screened AR candidates on contract, temp-to-hire, or direct hire.
Where PrideStaff Dallas fits
We’ve placed AR and AP clerks, accountants, and finance people across Dallas, Plano, Richardson, Irving, and Addison for over 25 years, and you work with the same local team from your first call. Nothing gets handed to another office. Send us your resume and tell us what systems you’ve used. We’ll tell you which Dallas roles you can get with what you have today, and which skill would open up the rest.