Automating F&A

Moderator:

Jacek Pączek, Director, Herbalife Finance Shared Services Centre

Panellists:

Tim Lodge, Sales Director, Moreton Smith
Chris McGibbon, Managing Director, Rimilia
Tim Woodhouse, Business Automation Specialist, Top Image Systems

Objective

For the audience to see first hand how the transaction processes of Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable are inextricably linked and how they also drive each others process, and to demonstrate Technology solutions that not only resolve the issues but provide real Return on Investment in their own right.

Initial Session Overview

Organisations generally provide goods and / or services that involve buying things to either add value to or to enable a service to be provided. This requires purchases to be made. Sales to customers are then made which require invoicing and payment in order to complete the transaction.

Interestingly, whilst it may seem that these processes are related but not directly linked, in terms of resource utilisation, the process actually gets driven from back to front with collections being the primary driver of people related tasks. This extended session will walk through the task cycle from end to end demonstrating how the application of technology can reduce the amount of tasks that require intervention and also how using technology can provide real benefits to all elements of the process both in terms of efficiency benefits and working capital benefits too.

Allocating Cash Receipts to Sales Invoices

Any collections team is only as effective as the accuracy of the data which they have to work from. Having done the seemingly difficult task of getting a customer to pay, not being able to allocate the payment received to the appropriate invoices quickly and efficiently will result in incorrect customer statements being issued or dunning letters / calls in addition to reducing the amount of credit a customer can utilise to buy more goods or services. Run through the inherent problems with cash allocation – remittance data, payers vs debtors etc.

The Collections Process

Having established an accurate Sales Ledger, ideally what you now want to do is focus the collections resource on the debt that is not paid regularly and within agreed terms. The ability to align automated work flow strategies based on past payment performance at debtor level is possible with the use of current technologies. Using a system which learns the customer payment behaviour and enables you to tailor the collections process by customer payment performance is now possible. This technology provides the reassurance that as soon as ‘the norm’ is deviated from pre-determined appropriate triggers and actions will be deployed. These triggers when activated can be emailed to the debtor or query resolver in an interactive communication allowing the individual the capacity to resolve, act or comment without the need to involve a member of the credit control team. Add to this the ability to have complete transparency of the collector’s activity and performance in real time then you have negated the requirement to monitor time consuming and retrospective excel spreadsheets. Imagine then being able view this management information in real time dashboards delivered to all forms of media interfaces including smart phones and tablets? Credit decisions can be made on situations that occur when they happen giving you and your customers the ability to communicate in a proactive fashion.

Accounts Payable

The receiver of invoices which require processing. The processing of invoices is very straight forward, unfortunately the increase in financial controls around purchasing make the process more problematic than ever. Most ERP systems now require a Purchase Order number to enable an invoice to be processes. This not only ensures that correct financial delegated authority was applied before the commitment to purchase was made, it also ensures no payments can physically be made to suppliers without one since an invoice cannot be registered on the system without a PO. Whilst this works well for financial control, the transaction processing practicalities can become somewhat cumbersome. Without a PO, the invoice cannot be registered therefore leading to a raft of supplier referrals to chase for PO numbers or ignoring the invoices which creates more work when the collections process in the supplier process starts to chase for payment. Using technology to not only capture invoices but also to automatically validate them and process exceptions through a workqueue will dramatically reduce processing time and ‘rework’ from the collectors perspective.

Electronic invoicing

Producing paper invoices is not only costly and slow, they are also more difficult to process from your customers perspective. Electronic invoicing and / or ebilling enables this to become a straight through process resulting in invoices being brought into the automated accounts payable process without human intervention and results in only exceptions being brought to an accounts payable users attention.

Each sub-set should reference the one before and the one after and include a max 10-15 minute quick demonstration of a solution for that process.