When it comes to accounts receivable management, manual processes, high operating costs and slow cycle times plague companies large and small. To solve these challenges, many turn to automation. The field is crowded with fintechs, banks, ERPs and other solution providers promising a range of improvements to data quality, completeness and straight-through processing rates for customer payments.
Lost in translation, however, is that for AR automation to succeed, it needs to include more than just systems and data.
A better approach considers how AR team members—and their colleagues in sales, customer service and treasury management—spend their time. Instead of the sleek order-to-cash lifecycle many AR automation vendors present, with each step flowing in an orderly, linear fashion, the internal team knows the reality of billing and cash application. It’s often more of a messy back-and-forth that better resembles a maze.
For automation to work, it requires AR team participation—especially from the “doers” on the team who will use the software every day. Without this human integration at every stage, from defining automation need to implementation and onboarding, most AR automation initiatives fail to deliver meaningful results.
Conducting just a few “day in the life” conversations with the AR team usually reveals that true efficiency in the cash conversion cycle requires more than simply matching payment data to the open invoice file. It also needs to solve for the everyday communication, procedures and knowledge that only the AR team has truly mastered.
Learn more about cross-functional communication and empowering your AR team to succeed. Download this white paper to dive deeper into:
