Robert Kugel of Vantana Research makes some interesting observations in his December article, Make Accounts Receivable Pay, including this one:
It’s taken the pandemic to raise awareness of the value of digitally transforming Accounts Receivable management.
His point is that, while CFOs and accounting staff have long been acutely conscious of the need to keep the cash coming in, the sudden transition to remote working has created a new urgency. It has shone a spotlight on the inherent limitations of just throwing more bodies at highly inefficient, centralized, manual processes.
Vantana’s Office of Finance benchmark research, referred to in the above article, supports this position. It shows a close correlation between an organization’s level of competence in using technology and the performance of their accounting functions.
If your business is handling thousands of invoices a month, it might be time to look at sophisticated AI solutions. These can use machine learning to rapidly match receipts to invoices, then automatically post journal entries to your ERP System. But where do you start if this is out of your reach?
How is this relevant to Sage 300?
If you are a medium-sized business, with transaction volumes more in keeping with the typical Sage 300 site, all is not lost. Reassuringly, Kugel tries to demystify a potentially intimidating term:
For me, Digital Transformation just means making full use of proven, practical, and affordable information technology to improve departmental performance, substantially reducing the need for people to do low-value work that computers can do faster and more accurately…
That’s sounding a lot like Orchid’s tag line for our Streamlining Financial Processes solutions: Improve productivity & accuracy while taking the drudgery out of processing complex but routine transactions.
Here are some ideas for how you might start to streamline your Accounts Receivable processes, using Sage 300 add-ons from Orchid Systems.
- Use Document Management Link to assist matching by having relevant invoice and receipt artefacts readily available to staff, even when working at multiple locations.
- Use Notes to share context-sensitive information, enhancing collaboration between A/R staff working remotely.
- Take that further with Extended Notes, using Extender to generate and display dynamic Notes on the fly. (E.g. lists of outstanding invoices, with drill-through when more information is required.)
- Use Extender Workflow to streamline A/R related business processes, e.g. robust approval mechanisms for managing Customer Credit Limits.
- Potentially use Extender Developer as a platform for more ambitious AI-based automation of matching processes, taking advantage of Python’s reputation as the go-to language for data science and machine learning.
- Use an Info-Explorer cube to calculate, report and analyse that key A/R metric, Days Sales Outstanding (DSO), by Customer, Account Set, Salesperson, Location, etc.
