Text transcript of the interview with Amélie Baroukh, Credit Manager at CIS Bio International, Curium Group
Hello, I’m Amélie Baroukh, credit manager at CIS Bio International since 2012, specializing in nuclear medicine.
When I joined the company, I was put in charge of cash management, with the task of improving the level of collections. So I looked for solutions on the market from various companies. We met Aston, who seemed to us to be very well suited to our accounting software and requirements. We have chosen to cooperate.
(Why Aston iTF?)
CIS Bio International has sales of 110 million euros. Our aim was to reduce DSO and improve cash flow. So we set up Aston and the results were almost immediate. We’ve been able to move away from manual, telephone and email reminder tasks, and concentrate on mass reminders. The results were a 20% increase in cash receipts, and a 25% reduction in tedious tasks. As a result, my accountants were able to focus on much more interesting analytical tasks than dunning.
(How do you use the Aston iTF platform in your day-to-day life?)
So the set-up was accessible to everyone. For CIS Bio International and my entire accounting team, the time saved, the gains in efficiency and data veracity are more than possible. We can’t afford to go backwards and part with Aston.
The Aston platform now enables me to provide my management team with dashboards fairly quickly, as we have a fairly high level of demand. They keep track of customers, both bad and good payers, and of cash flow at all times. I’m frequently asked to provide precise, concrete data on our customers and on the progress of our ageing balance. We created relationships with Aston that now exist directly on the platform. They are dedicated to us and have been customized by our teams, enabling us to produce the reports requested by our management in less than 5 minutes.
Another good thing about the Aston platform is that the data we publish today is an exact reflection of our accounting. We do not question any charts that we distribute to our management or other internal CIS Bio International customers.
It was decided to involve sales staff in cash management. That’s why we’ve developed accesses for each of them, so that they can access their customer file during their appointments and see the status of the account, outstandings and any missing invoices, so that they can print invoices for them, without having to call the accountants and become autonomous in these tasks.
(To go further! With Aston iTF)
As our cooperation works very well, we decided when factoring was announced within our company to cooperate again with Aston in order to build up the files, approach the bank directly, communicate with them and provide all the data they needed to be able to do our factoring sessions. The first sessions went well, the data transmitted was once again exhaustive, and from an accounting point of view we can keep track of everything that happens between our accounts, Aston and the bank and find our way around correctly. Once again, we’ve been successful in our cooperation.
Aston has this module in its platform, so we entrusted it with 100% of the work. This project was quickly implemented. Aston met all our bank’s technical requirements. The first sessions went smoothly and easily, without mobilizing CIS Bio International’s internal resources.