Accounts receivable administrators encounter numerous hurdles daily, from hunting down late payers to reconciling payments with scant remittance information.
FREMONT, CA: Most accounts receivable (AR) specialists would agree that their jobs can be somewhat monotonous at times. Since many firms have not fully modernized their approaches to AR, these teams spend a disproportionate amount of time on low-value work.
Consider some obstacles for accounts receivable administrators, as well as how to overcome them.
Paying late
The challenge: An AR department’s primary responsibility is to ensure that the company is paid on schedule. When consumers pay late, it becomes challenging to balance cash and obtain working capital. Suppose AR professionals have no method of knowing why their customers haven’t paid yet, or why they’ve underpaid or taken deductions. In that case, AR professionals have difficulty removing the hurdles that may be preventing willing and attempting customers from paying.
The solution: An excellent place to start is by examining customer communications. Rather than responding to client questions by phone and email—which can quickly become a full-time job in and of itself—an online portal that allows customers to remark on specific bills and line-item information eliminates this pointless back and forth. The teams may therefore respond quickly and immediately to messages via the portal without ever having to look for the context of a particular query.
Management of data
The challenge: AR managers demand data from various sources, including ERPs, bank lockboxes, ecommerce sites, and spreadsheets. However, the more data sources AR professionals use, the more time-consuming the process is and the more likely AR professionals obtain stale or erroneous data.
The solution: The more data AR professionals can combine and provide the team with a single source of truth for anything augmented reality, the better. One way to accomplish this is by implementing an order-to-cash solution that is tightly integrated with their ERP. To account for the complexity of their unique ERP deployment, ensure that AR professionals partner with a vendor who will work with them throughout the implementation process and post-launch to ensure that all systems integrate seamlessly.
