Companies are keen to develop a cash culture, but getting the rest of the company on board, sharing the right financial analysis or simply automating the business processes involved in this cash culture are not necessarily straightforward.
Cash culture: how to democratize it in the workplace
4 non-exhaustive reflections on how to simplify this corporate evolution:
1) Simplify the analysis and sharing of the right information for better convincing
Excel may not be your best friend… Many companies still spend several days a month producing analysis views of DSO, aged balances or disputes. Today, it’s easy to benefit from data visualization solutions. Thanks to these automatically generated views, the credit manager can gain in efficiency and impact within the company. It’s easy to analyze performance, identify pockets of DSO optimization and high-risk customers, and enhance the value provided to the entire company at every level: subsidiary, branch, brand, salesperson or customer portfolio. Sharing the cah culture is already sharing information in a visual and factual way.
2) Robotize dunning and collection processes for greater efficiency
According to PwC https://www.pwc.fr/priorites-2017-directeur-financier.html, robotization will be a key factor in improving the efficiency and agility of financial services. Just like the growing use of Cloud and Big Data or artificial intelligence. This automation should enable you to predefine scenarios and actions, and then let the software manage these low value-added tasks for you, allowing you to concentrate on performance analysis and improvement. This robotization must be granular, by type of customer, with or without a human control point, and above all scalable. Artificial intelligence will also enable this automation to be adjusted in a learning way according to the impact and success of each action for each customer. For example, with Next Best Action (NBA) features. The robotization of dunning and collections, combined with continuous improvement of dunning scenarios, could reduce late payments by 20-50%. Delegate low value-added tasks and concentrate on cash culture sharing and preventive analysis.
3) Continuous improvement of the Order to Cash (O2C) process
The ability to modify your dunning scenarios on the fly, in complete autonomy, and to customize them according to your context and customer portfolios, also enables you to test and simulate the effectiveness of specific actions, and DSO gains per scenario, per portfolio, and to continuously improve your collection process thanks to the agility you’ve acquired. The time when it took several weeks (months?) to modify a dunning letter, a collection scenario has been resolved. Today, agility is one of the essential keys to any business process, enabling it to adapt to a constantly changing environment. Cash culture should be easy to adapt to your company’s needs, with the click of a button.
4) Have your customers manage your collections?
Setting up a collaborative space with your customers, enabling them to digitally share actions and exchanges around collections, is a major gain in efficiency and optimization of team time. Most organizations consider that at least 15% of team time is spent talking to customers about information that is already available (invoice not found, change of contact person, misunderstanding, etc.). A digital space for sharing information and exchanging ideas with your customers can enable them to consult their account statements and dematerialized invoices in real time, and inform you of a promise to pay, a dispute, etc. All of which means productivity gains for your teams and satisfaction for your customers.