How to Automate Your Accounts Receivable Process

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You save business clients a ton of time paying and keeping track of their bills, while freeing up your own AR team’s schedule to take on new tasks and responsibilities. Reduce errors with automated workflows in QuickBooks Online Advanced. According to a recent QuickBooks Live business growth survey, 97% of small business owners say they personally manage at least one area of business operations. That’s a simple example, and automated workflows can have numerous triggers, actions, or results and become far more complex than that. They’ll serve as the “point person” for that automated workflow to ensure that it’s working correctly and troubleshoot if any errors or problems crop up.

The first step is to phone or send an email or snail mail reminder to inform them of the past due status of bills. This allows the consumer to clarify their circumstances regarding the outstanding invoice. Accounts receivable automation delivers key CX gains and alleviates customer frustrations, boosting their attitudes toward your business.

With NetSuite, you go live in a predictable timeframe — smart, stepped implementations begin with sales and span the entire customer lifecycle, so there’s continuity from sales to services to support. Focus your collections efforts on the most impactful invoices for your business and unlock an accurate view of your future cash flows with Centime’s accounts receivable automation software. We help your team preserve adequate liquidity and predict payment delays.

What is Accounts Receivable Automation?

Whether new to BlackLine or a longtime customer, we curate events to guide you along every step of your modern accounting journey. World-class support so you can focus on what matters most.BlackLine provides global product support across geographies, languages, and time zones, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. We are here for you with industry-leading support whenever and wherever you need it.

  • Automating your accounts receivable (AR) process is no longer a luxury but a necessity for modern businesses aiming to streamline operations and enhance financial efficiency.
  • For instance, If you’re closely working with your account management team to collect your invoices, you’ll want to grant them access to your tool.
  • Design intuitive AR dashboards to provide real-time visibility into key AR metrics and KPIs, such as average invoice aging, disputed invoices, days sales outstanding, bad debt ratio, and collector performance.
  • Customers can initiate payments at any time of the day through the portal, reducing the need to contact your AR team regarding payments.
  • PCI DSS establishes a baseline degree of safety for customers and aids in the reduction of fraud and data breaches throughout the payment ecosystem.

Easily view performance by period and monitor payment patterns by customer. When CentimePay is used, Centime provides automatic cash application to those receivables. Set your payment preferences, gain a comprehensive end-to-end audit trail, and apply cash automatically to your General Ledger for seamless financial management. With Centime’s AR automation solution, you can automatically forecast and predict delays, and instantly view the impact of those delays on future cash flows. Automating credit checks during customer onboarding improves risk assessment, while real-time transaction approvals limit ongoing exposure.

Transform your accounts receivable processes.

Improve client relationships by giving your customers an easy, secure way to pay by ACH or credit card. One of the most common causes of non-payments and rising DSOs are disputes. Monitor disputes, understand the reasons for them, and try to resolve them as soon as possible, to avoid delayed collections. Our integrated technologies benefit both firms and their clients by automating the accounts receivable process and compliance work.

Automates payment approvals.

This integration automates the synchronization and transfer of invoice details, payment data, customer information, and more between these two vital systems. BlackLine and our ecosystem of software and cloud partners work together to transform our joint customers’ finance and accounting processes. Together, we provide innovative solutions that help F&A teams achieve shorter close cycles and better controls, enabling them to drive better decision-making across the company. The revenue cycle refers to the entirety of a company’s ordering process from the time an order is placed until an invoice is paid and settled. The inability to apply payments on time and accurately can not only lock up cash, but also negatively impact future sales and the overall customer experience.

You’ll have reliable, tested workflows in place that take care of those tasks consistently and by the book. Remember to include your present systems so that they can estimate the transfer time, development labour, and expenses. These inputs will assist you in better comparing AR automation technologies and quantifying future expenditures. Look for evaluations of AR automation tools and chat with your colleagues about their choices.

What are Accounts Receivable in Property Management?

The first quarter goes by smoothly, but the customer wants adjustments (such as add-ons, upgrade/downgrade, and the like) in the second quarter. Now, imagine hundreds or thousands of customers instead of one – it would be impossible for any company to pull this off manually. Apxium delivers an entire financial technology (FinTech) toolkit, purpose-built for accounting firms to solve their most complex pain points around accounts receivable, compliance and collecting payments. Partepay integrates with all leading accounting software and automates the entire receivables management process for SMBs. Cashflow.io ensures a smooth onboarding experience, enabling you to connect your business bank accounts and payment processors seamlessly and at no cost. Moreover, the platform is highly customizable, allowing you to tailor its features to align with your evolving business requirements.

Improved cash flow forecasting.

Maintain the security of sensitive customer information in your AR data by allowing granular control of data access through customizable role-based permissions. Different teams or individuals within your company should have specific access levels based on their roles. Personalize the content and dynamically insert customer details using merge fields for names, invoice numbers, amounts due, etc. These personalized notifications improve customer engagement and contribute to on-time payment rates. The first step in asking for payment professionally is to send a courteous email reminder.

Those different approaches and perspectives don’t cause any snags when you automate accounting and finance processes. With features designed to facilitate quicker payments from customers, our billing portal accelerates your revenue cycle. Schedule automated, individualized payment reminders, and automate late payment dunning notices. We at Chargebee Receivables understand that collecting receivables is a two-way process. With an easy-to-access customer portal, we ensure that your customers have visibility into what they owe and why, the option of redressal if they have a problem, and a “Pay Early” option if they don’t want to wait. Establish payment conditions that include incentives for customers to pay early (or penalties for persistent late payers).

Most automation solutions provide interactive analytical dashboards. They give accurate and helpful information on the right KPIs, like DSO, aging reports, cash flow reports, and collection effectiveness index (CEI), and enable you to make strategic financial decisions. Now that we’ve covered the main reasons why you should automate your accounts receivables, let’s take a look at the best practices that companies can – and should – follow. Accounts receivable automation — or AR automation — automates manual accounts receivable processes with software to save time, reduce costs and prevent errors. Swift access to financing is vital for effective accounts receivable management, especially for substantial customer invoices. Cashflow.io simplifies this process by offering near-instant approval and same-day funding directly through the platform, eliminating the inconvenience of lengthy applications and traditional banking channels.

Automating your invoice distribution to follow delivery schedules and apply highly specific sending rules increases efficiency to improve your company’s bottom line. By implementing these practices and adopting a holistic AR automation solution, businesses can reduce manual efforts and errors, accelerate payments, enhance reporting, and proactively manage credit risks. The result is a more agile, efficient, and competitive financial operation that positions your business for sustained growth and success. The appropriate AR automation software may help you save time on financial closure and free up your staff for higher-value work. According to a B2B payments survey, firms that automate AR procedures reduce their DSO by 23 days.

You should also pay attention to the scope of the KPIs, i.e. if you can zoom in and out on your metrics. For example, Upflow allows you to directly click on an invoice to access your account from your billing cohort. By automating more repetitive tasks – which tend to be lower-value a proforma invoice – AR automation allows you to make better use of your receivable team’s efforts. When you automate your accounts receivable, you can rest assured that the numbers you have are the correct ones. You’ve got peace of mind, allowing you to make better business decisions in the long run.