The two most important assets to your business are your customers and your cash.
This means your accounting department is arguably the most important area of your operation. It manages both, daily. Invoicing customers and collecting payments, while keeping those customers happy, is critical to your success.
Since you need both customers and cash to run and grow your business, it stands to reason that anything you can do to optimise your accounting department and increase its efficiency is worth looking into.
An automated accounts receivable solution lets you streamline your approach to receivables, and provides your business with several measurable benefits that can’t be ignored.
Here are four reasons leading companies like yours are increasingly automating their collections and receivables processes.
1. Accelerated, predictable cash flow
Cash flow can make or break your business.
Approximately 60% of business owners worry about their cash flow every month. Accounting automation solutions help businesses solve their cash flow problems—or even prevent them from materialising in the first place. With automation in place, your AR staff no longer has to manually send emails to customers reminding them that payments are coming due or letting them know that payments are late. All of these communications are sent to clients automatically—meaning your customers are never billed late.
What’s more, leading automation solutions give customers the ability to pay directly from the emails they receive—which sure beats forcing them to hop over to another platform to make a payment. Automated solutions also give businesses the ability to easily observe their accounting metrics through real-time dashboards.
As a result of these features, businesses that use accounting automation benefit from accelerated, predictable cash flow and avoid getting blindsided by unforeseen cash shortages.
2. Improved AR metrics
The better your accounting metrics—such as days sales outstanding (DSO) and average days delinquent (ADD)—the healthier your company’s finances will be. It’s that simple.
With an automated AR solution in place, you can improve your AR metrics because invoices and related communications will be sent on schedule and payments will be processed immediately. Your AR team will have a complete view of the customer’s account, ensuring they provide timely and appropriate service.
This means collections are handled efficiently, disputes are managed more quickly, and common inquiries are managed through automation and self-service. Companies that use automated AR solutions that provide this kind of support, like YayPay, can reduce their DSO by up to 30%.
The bottom line? The more insight you have into your AR metrics, the easier it will be to improve them.
3. Reclaimed time
Automation frees your accountants from many manual tasks, such as tracking down information, producing reports, and calculating statistics.
There are only so many hours in the day. The more tasks you take off of your plates, the more time you and your staff will have to focus on other important facets of operations.
As automation increasingly makes its way into accounting departments, industry pundits believe that the AR staff will invest more of their time in things such as strategic planning and IT initiatives—which, over time, will make their departments even more efficient.
4. Increased productivity
With more time on their hands thanks to automation, an AR staff can focus on tasks they might otherwise ignore. Rather than creating aging reports manually, they can focus on developing stronger relationships with customers.
The right automation platform can help your accounting department work a lot faster and a lot more effectively. In essence, the investment can make it seem as though you’re increasing your team’s head count even though productivity is simply increasing because technology is taking care of manual tasks.
Taking care of both your customers and your cash requires time, attention, accuracy and consistency. This leads to strong relationships and a predictable, growth-oriented business.
In today’s increasingly competitive business landscape, an automated AR solution is no longer a nice-to-have: it’s a must.
Learn more about how to get more from your automated AR solution.
