How to Automate Your Accounts Receivable Process

Increase working capital and availability of cash which are critical to any company’s success. Collect more cash and significantly reduce days sales outstanding (DSO) by increasing overall productivity and prioritizing the actions that have the highest impact. Global and regional advisory and consulting firms bring deep finance domain expertise, process transformation leadership, and shared passion for customer value creation to our joint customers. Our consulting partners help guide large enterprise and midsize organizations undergoing digital transformation by maximizing and accelerating value from BlackLine’s solutions.

Any newly input or edited data is pushed out to all linked systems so you don’t have to deal with updating files across multiple applications or suffer the consequences of inconsistent data. Build confidence in your relationships with clients by enabling them to easily track the status of their unpaid invoices or payment history through the payment portal’s intuitive digital interface. Allow customers to choose preferred payment guidelines like invoice autopay or a recurring payment schedule all while accepting a wide range of payment types including credit, debit, ACH, eCheck, and more. I was managing dozens of concurrent workflows often spending hours on invoicing each month. Lockstep Inbox not only saves me time, it allows me to track and manage communications with each of my clients. Connect customers directly to their accounts online to accelerate payment timeliness and accuracy.

Data reporting.

Your company provided goods or services to customers on credit, and now it’s time to collect the money customers owe. Selling products and services and collecting payments are arguably the most fundamental elements of a successful business. If the company doesn’t collect these payments, the business could be at risk of failing. BlackLine is a high-growth, SaaS business that is transforming and modernizing the way finance and accounting departments operate. Our cloud software automates critical finance and accounting processes.

Save time and streamline processes with communications and dunning automation, turning hours of work into minutes. In a constantly changing world, AR is no exception — AR leaders need accurate and relevant data to monitor performance, adjust strategies and goals, and make the best possible business decisions. Create workflow biweekly vs semi-monthly payroll rules to secure your decisions and automate the approval process when necessary (credit reviews, deductions validation, etc), as per your credit policy. This guide will help you identify your AP automation needs, prepare for conversations with vendors, and tips on what to ask when evaluating software partners.

Optimize working capital by driving world-class order-to-cash processes and leveraging decision intelligence to drive better business outcomes. Companies come to BlackLine because their traditional manual accounting processes are not sustainable. We help them move to modern accounting by unifying their data and processes, automating repetitive work, and driving accountability through visibility. Timely, reliable data is critical for decision-making and reporting throughout the M&A lifecycle.

Reducing costs.

This is important as cross-team collaboration is crucial for efficient cash collection. Having this feature helps team members easily pick up at different touchpoints during the collection process. Upflow for instance, centralizes and tracks in real-time customers’ payment timelines and cash application. Any team member from sales or customer success can intervene at any time if necessary.

• By automating accounts receivable processes, you reduce the time it takes for invoices to reach customers – enabling faster customer payments.
• As you implement AR automation, clearly state the goals behind the move.
• Paystand customers can see up to a 60% decrease in DSO and improve cash flow bottlenecks in the AP processes.
• In fact, it’s an ideal way to centralize and streamline simple internal accounts receivable tasks.

Whether you’re new to F&A or an experienced professional, sometimes you need a refresher on common finance and accounting terms and their definitions. BlackLine’s glossary provides descriptions for industry words and phrases, answers to frequently asked questions, and links to additional resources. Accelerate adoption and drive productivity and performance.One of the critical success drivers for any software technology is effective user training and adoption. Whether you are deploying for the first time or creating a sustainable education program for maximum value creation, explore how you can take the next steps to upskill your users. While the responsibility to maintain compliance stretches across the organization, F&A has a critical role in ensuring compliance with financial rules and regulations.

Maximize AR team capacity and efficiency

Accelerate dispute resolution with automated workflows to maintain customer relationships. Reduce or eliminate manual tasks, allowing AR teams to focus on actions that drive results, and strengthen decision intelligence to deliver significant value to the organization. BlackLine partners with top global Business Process Outsourcers and equips them with solutions to better serve their clients and achieve market-leading automation, efficiencies, and risk control. By outsourcing, businesses can achieve stronger compliance, gain a deeper level of industry knowledge, and grow without unnecessary costs. F&A leadership can have a significant impact by creating sustainable, scalable processes that can support the business before, during, and long after the IPO. This company-wide effort crosses multiple functional areas and is reinforced by critical project management and a strong technology infrastructure.

Stay up to date on the latest corporate and high-level product developments at BlackLine. BlackLine Magazine provides daily updates on everything from companies that have transformed F&A to new regulations that are coming to disrupt your day, week, and month.

Optimize business performance

Now’s your chance to book a demo with our payment experts and supercharge your cash collection. What CFOs need is immediate, real-time access to high-level “financial health” information to help them drill down into who’s paying and who’s not. And for those customers who aren’t paying in a timely manner, they need to know what roadblocks are getting in the way of that. In other words, they simply need to know early on what risks are impacting the bottom line, so they can course-correct and identify critical process improvements to be made.

For automated cash application to function, businesses need to offer online payment methods to their customers. Setting up automatic payment reminders to those who owe a payment is an important part of the automation process and saves time for the AR team. During this step, you can determine the timing for sending out payment reminders. More than 4,200 companies of all sizes, across all industries, trust BlackLine to help them modernize their financial close, accounts receivable, and intercompany accounting processes.

Make the most of your team’s time by automating accounts receivables tasks and using data to drive priority, action, and results. Being customer-driven is an important quality every business must possess in order to succeed. So why waste time on cumbersome, repetitive, and monotonous tasks when you can be using that time to improve your company’s customer experience and attract new customers. The invoices for the same can either be sent physically or through email. Your client is then supposed to pay the amount on the payment terms agreed between your company and them.

Now, imagine hundreds or thousands of customers instead of one – it would be impossible for any company to pull this off manually. The big takeaway here is that accounts receivable automation exists to automate and simplify the processes that don’t necessarily need to be manual. It should still give you the flexibility to keep high-value work as manual as you want or need it to be, during sensitive phases like the onboarding for example.

Accounts Receivable Automation helps your organization optimize mission-critical AR processes, such as customer invoicing and payment processing. With AR Automation, the tedious process of applying cash to open AR is streamlined and automated to power financial transactions between your company and its customers. It also helps you organize all of your order-to-cash documents, including quote requests, sales orders, shipping documents, delivery receipts, and more. Manual invoicing and the accounts receivable (AR) process can be riddled with inefficiencies, unnecessary costs and late payments. These late payments are hindering 37% of companies from being able to accurately forecast their cash flow, and about a third have lost customers and contracts because of their manual AR processes. By taking human error out of the loop, AR automation improves data consistency with real-time responsiveness while managing multiple customers and complex systems.

Payments

All types of receivables are generally reported at their net realizable value on the balance sheet. When a supplier or vendor sends an invoice to the buyer, it should have details of the purchase, its cost, the number of units bought, and the expected payment date. The terms and conditions document clarifies the commitments and the requirements of the company and the information necessary for the credit sales. We’ve compiled answers to some of the most commonly asked questions about Esker’s Accounts Receivable automation solution.

• When a supplier or vendor sends an invoice to the buyer, it should have details of the purchase, its cost, the number of units bought, and the expected payment date.
• When all the information is accurate and all the data sources are similar, everyone is doing their jobs based on the same information and through this, any chances of errors and confusion are discarded.
• Powered by Esker Synergy AI, it can be easily scaled to optimize and connect each step of the invoice-to-cash (I2C) process — improving overall efficiency, visibility and collaboration.
• The patent link can be attached with the invoice you send to your clients through which they can transfer the payment.

An EIPP platform provides dashboards and reporting to improve cash position forecasting, as well as insight to support more effective collections management. Transform Accounting function by automating tasks such as account reconciliation, journal entries to achieve day zero financial close, improve accuracy; thereby providing real-time visibility into financial data. Thinking beyond the business requirements, it’s important that AR automation be embedded within the organization’s accounting system and be able to invoice customers using a variety of formats. If the organization does business internationally, it’s crucial that the software has the necessary support for all the countries where the business operates.