Boosting Efficiency: The Power Of Automation In Resolving Accounts Receivable Inefficiencies

By Author: Sudarshan Banerjee
Total Articles: 3
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Operational inefficiencies in Accounts Receivables Management hinders a business’ cash flow and overall financial stability. Here’s a look at some top AR Inefficiencies, or should we say ‘Pain Points’ of the AR Management Process that can be easily taken care of by implementing AR Automation.

GETTING PAID ON-TIME – ISN’T THAT THE ULTIMATE GOAL

At the cost of affecting your business’ bottom line, delay in payment, in fact, provides your customers with free financing. According to recent studies, many finance leaders cite manual processes as the biggest challenge that affect timely payments. The key reason is that when AR Teams handle collections manually, they have no centralized system to see which customers need to be reminded about upcoming payments and at what time – the manual processes make it extremely difficult for your AR Teams to promptly follow up on overdue invoices.

Getting paid on time through manual processes relies heavily on your ability and capacity to send out dunning letters and communicate with customers through disjointed outreach efforts, such as phone, emails or WhatsApp. ...
... There are two issues at play here, one, these are often difficult to track and two, are difficult to scale. So, what businesses land up doing is increase the headcount or go through a significant team restructuring, both of which are not sustainable.

AR Automation tools, such as Inebura, automate and deliver timely notifications, prompts and dunning letters that helps your team focus on collections priorities. Inebura delivers a solution that goes beyond simple automation – it integrates the customer as a tenet of the collections process. It connects your AR Team and your customers via a shared, online portal that encourages real-time engagement and discussion. This insures that customers are more empowered to offer inputs on their invoices and make timely payments.

INVOICE ERRORS & MISTAKES – A TRUE EMBARASSMENT

Manual data entry to generate invoices can lead to disputes and ultimately delay payments. Moreover, frequent errors in invoicing can not only prove to be embarrassing, but it can also make the customer lose confidence in your team and you.

Incorrect listing of information on invoices in manual invoice-to-cash process is, in fact, one of the most common issue that AR Teams face on a regular basis. When teams have to generate a ton of invoices, they’re more likely to make mistakes, such as inputting the incorrect amount, wrong invoice numbers, wrong GST number, incorrect discount etc. Such invoices can delay payments as it takes time to respond to customer requests for changes/ clarifications and then apply revisions.

Most of the time, businesses get to know about such an error only when the bill is due. And the customers are not willing to pay until the correction has been made. That truly delays the process and results in higher DSO.

AR Automation Software, such as Inebura, can integrate with your existing ERP to automatically send invoices once they’ve been generated in the accounting software. This ensures no manual intervention nor invoice-related issues by reducing the possibility of data entry errors.

PROCESSING OF PAPER-BASED RECEIVABLES – THEY’RE REALLY SLOWING YOU DOWN!

Whatever we might say about digital payments, check payments still remain the most widely used method of payment. But, check payments are not solely responsible for slowing you down, it’s also the way your business is processing those checks. AR Teams land up spending resources, efforts and time (and money) on manually accepting, processing, and posting checks.

Without AR Automation Software, such as Inebura, AR Teams spend valuable time on manually processing and posting paper checks. This includes keying in of associated customer information and payment details into their back-office systems.

Inebura can help streamline check & remittance processing, deposit and cash application from a single solution – scan checks and remittance documents; view, associate and store all relevant information in a central location that’s secure.

With Inebura, your AR Teams can drastically reduce the amount of time they spend on processing paper checks and/ or any associated paper remittance documents, the time they can utilize to work on value-added tasks. The added benefit is lowering of costs and the lowering of risk associated with tedious, error-prone tasks.