Before: Too Many Systems … Too Much Wasted Time Meet Julie. Julie is a credit manager in the Chicago office of a large wholesale distribution company. Each month, she and her team of five collectors oversee thousands of customer accounts and over $4.5 million in past due payments. Every Monday at 9:00 a.m., Julie receives a Microsoft Excel report that contains key information on all of her accounts. The massive file contains more than 40 columns, and thousands of rows. The spreadsheet is Julie’s primary way to track aging invoices, payments, and disputes. But the data gets old – fast. As soon as someone runs the report, the data is stale...but Julie must rely on it for the entire week. Julie does the best that she can with the information she has on hand. On Monday morning, she carves up the Excel report into actionable items for the team. She performs the tedious task of importing data from Excel into Crystal Reports. Although some of the data that Julie moves into Crystal Reports is already old, she doesn’t have a better way to show collectors where they need to focus their follow-up efforts. Julie spends her afternoons acting on the Read More

An AR automation tool can help you get paid faster while you reduce the burden on your in-house team. Ultimately, this helps you improve your cash flow and protect your margins. The next section of this guide will show you exactly how you can achieve these results (quickly and with minimal risk). Implementing an AR automation tool doesn’t need to take months or years. But to achieve rapid results, you need a plan. There are five steps you need to undertake to improve your finance efficiencies, deliver a better customer experience and bring in more money – faster. Here is the final step. - Missed Step 4? Click here to catch up. - 5. Consolidate your AR tools Your AR tools don’t just provide information about invoices and collections. They contain critical financial data that gives all of your stakeholders a clear view of your operations. Centralizing your disparate AR tools into one system allows you, your team and the rest of the C-suite to quickly find the numbers that they need when they need them. A central tool is particularly useful if you have multiple AR teams that are spread across the country. Your finance employees, sales reps, and Read More

Digital transformation doesn’t need to be lengthy. With the right plan, and the right solution, you can achieve quick results with minimal risks. There are five steps you need to undertake to improve your finance efficiencies, deliver a better customer experience and bring in more money – faster. Here’s step 4. - Missed Step 3? Click here to catch up. - 4. Go beyond a payment portal As the B2B space becomes more digital, you might have considered offering customers a portal where they can pay invoices and check their accounts online. Perhaps you have even tried such a portal. Payment portals are a great step if you want to delight your customers while getting your money in faster. However, an online payment portal won’t help you achieve these goals if your customers don’t use it. Distributors tell us that many online portals offer a poor experience and make customers jump through hoops just  to submit a payment. For example, customers may need to navigate to a link that is buried deep within your website. Or your customers might receive unbranded invoices that make them think of spam. Another issue with payment portals is that most are built for B2C Read More

Are you struggling at months end to reconcile all of your cash receipts? When it comes to the cash application process, the advent of electronic payments has actually made the process more difficult. With ACH, wire and credit card remittances coming from many sources - including mail, email, web portals, and EDI - the process has become labor-intensive and complicated. But there is a solution. Intelligent automation technology can reduce the number of manual tasks your team manages on a daily basis by automatically matching cash receipts to invoices. Here are four ways that an automation software solution can help improve your match rates, reduce errors, and streamline the cash application process. 1. Email Remittance  For customers that send payment remittance via email – be it in the body of the email message or as a PDF, Excel, CSV, or EDI attachment - you can use robotic process automation (RPA) to download the data in to a cash application solution automatically. As soon as those files land in the remittance inbox. Once the information has been downloaded, RPAs can match the receipts to open invoices. 2. AP Portal  Walmart, Amazon and many large buyers use their own AP portals. This Read More

Transforming your finance processes doesn’t need to take months or years. But to achieve rapid results, you need a plan. There are five steps you need to undertake to improve your finance efficiencies, deliver a better customer experience and bring in more money – faster. Here’s step 3. - Missed Step 2? Click here to catch up. - 3. Define your success metrics AR automation can reduce your DSO by 5-25 days. Before you implement an AR automation tool, be clear on your expected ROI. Here are some areas where you should look to track the success of your AR automation solution once it has been implemented: Does it reduce the workload of your accounting team? Is the communication generated through the platform an improvement over email and phone? Does the integration with your ERP save your team time? Does the availability of this platform improve customer relationships? Are customers adopting the new platform? Do customers enjoy using the new platform? Does it increase the transparency of your AR? Does it reduce the number of printed documents required? Does it lower your DSO? Is it cash application easier and more accurate? Are fewer invoices going into collections? Let’s look at Read More

Whether your distribution company is growing, has stalled or is in decline, each scenario has its challenges. Whether enabling scale, securing profit margins and cash flow, or guarding against new competitive business models, you may not have the time or resources to devote to a lengthy finance transformation project. Transforming your finance processes doesn’t need to take months or years. But to achieve rapid results, you need a plan. There are five steps you need to undertake to improve your finance efficiencies, deliver a better customer experience and bring in more money – faster. Here’s step 2. - Missed Step 1? Click here to catch up. - 2. Assemble the right team According to a study by CIO.com , the lack of a strong team can cause your digital transformation project to fail. The top team-related challenges include leadership that isn’t committed, resistance to change, and a lack of talent to carry out the transformation. To ensure that your financial transformation succeeds, you must dedicate a person to change management – a champion. If your company is large, you may have a Change Manager. If your company is smaller, you can assign a business analyst to this role. Choose someone Read More

Transforming your finance processes doesn’t need to take months or years. But to achieve rapid results, you need a plan. There are five steps you need to undertake to improve your finance efficiencies, deliver a better customer experience and bring in more money – faster. Here’s step 1. 1. Assess your current state Charting your path for the future starts with understanding where you are now. Here are six questions that will help you identify inefficiencies in your current AR process and learn how they are impacting your cash flow. How many employees are involved with your collections processes? In addition to full-time collections staff, be sure to count other employees who follow up on late payments. Do you hire interns at year-end? Do your salespeople take time away from deals because they need to collect payments in order to get their commission checks, and what about your customer service team? How much time does AR spend on inefficient tasks? You might be surprised by how many hours disappear into your AR black hole. Consider how often your team resends invoices to customers – along with the time they spend searching for, scanning, mailing, or emailing supporting documents. Multiply those Read More

We are pleased to announced that VersaPay is a finalist in the 2019 SaaS Awards Program in the category ‘Best SaaS Product for Business Accounting or Finance’ as well as a finalist in The 2019 Credit & Collections Technology Awards in the category of ‘International Technology Innovation’. The SaaS Awards The SaaS Awards program is now in its fourth year of celebrating organizational successes and the software innovations that fuel them. With awards for excellence and innovation in SaaS, the Software-as-a-Service Awards program accepts entries worldwide, including the US, Canada, Australasia, EMEA and UK. SaaS Awards and Cloud Awards organizer Larry Johnson said: “The standard of entries this year was incredibly high, with consistent attention to innovation and most importantly, customer success. The volume of entries warranting consideration of a place on the coveted shortlist was unprecedented. “In our fourth year promoting SaaS exclusively alongside its sister awards program, the Cloud Awards, we have again seen a wide range of entries from Canada, Europe, Australia and the East joining those from the US. Moreover, again we are seeing such innovation from established blue-chips to agile start-ups. All seek to provide essential productivity tools to their users by leveraging cloud-based software Read More

Invoice-to-cash automation transforms an often-overlooked area into a competitive advantage. Many wholesale distributors use digital technology to automate parts of their supply chain. However, digital tools can also transform your post-sale experience to set you apart from other vendors. AR automation streamlines your manual, time-consuming processes by automating core elements including invoice presentment, collaboration, collections, payments, cash application, and bank reconciliation. It helps you get paid faster, which is critical when you’re faced with low profit margins and increasing cost of capital. It allows you to unlock money that is tied up in AR, improve your margins, better manage your cash flow, and ensure that you have the working capital you need to run your business. Give Customers a Better Experience AR automation improves the experience you provide to customers by giving them on-demand visibility into accounts. Customers can log-in through a customer portal 24/7 to view invoices and supporting documents, check the status of a payment, change their preferences, and more. The online portal allows payments to be made via desktop, smartphones or tablets, meaning customers can pay at any time they want. By offering a range of payment methods customers can also pay you how they want – Read More

You have the opportunity to use digital technology to protect your margins, free up your cash flow, and improve your customer experience Disruptors such as the Amazon Effect, shifting buyer expectations, and an increase in manufacturers that sell direct-to-consumer are putting your business at risk. According to a survey from Modern Distribution Management (MDM) , growth in the wholesale distribution market is expected to moderate. In fact, 30 percent of wholesale distributors are concerned about their outlook due to uncertain economic conditions, tariff trade wars, and a slowdown in residential construction. To thrive in today’s rapidly-changing landscape, you must use digital technology to transform your company and remain competitive. A report from IDC found that wholesale distributors who use digital technologies – such as robotics, analytics, and cloud services – can transform their finance processes and help them achieve the following benefits: Dramatically reduce your costs so that you can better protect your margins Improve your cash flow management Optimize your working capital Boost customer profitability IDC states, “Given the importance of cash flow, the effective management of both payables and receivables is critical, with a particular focus on chargeback management and identifying every opportunity to generate revenue. Integration with Read More

Digital transformation is about more than giving customers an online portal so that they can view information online. It’s about using technology across your business to boost efficiencies and provide customers with greater value. To stay competitive and improve the customer experience, you must embrace digital transformation. According to The Enterprisers Project digital transformation is “the integration of digital technology into all areas of a business resulting in fundamental changes to how businesses operate and how they deliver value to customers. Beyond that, it's a cultural change that requires organizations to continually challenge the status quo, experiment often, and get comfortable with failure. This sometimes means walking away from long-standing business processes that companies were built upon in favor of relatively new practices that are still being defined.” According to the National Association of Wholesale Distributors, “leaders must learn the art and science of innovation.” And they must do this sooner than later. The NAW recommends that wholesale distribution leaders, “follow a vision and plan for change” as opposed to allowing change to occur randomly or making it up along the way. According to the NAW, “digital tools are becoming a standard ingredient for running a profitable distributor business.” The Read More

As humans, more often than we’d like, we use our amygdala when confronted with the need to make quick and urgent decisions.  This is the Fight/Flight/Freeze portion of our brain. This part of the brain is designed to help keep us safe from nasty predators and other life-threatening scenarios. Thousands of years ago, it protected us from saber-toothed tigers. Today, we engage that portion of the brain when confronted with very different types of frightening situations. Neuroscientists have discovered that the portion of the brain that is activated when suffering financial losses is the same portion as when our ancestors were being confronted by that saber-toothed tiger.* Humans are hard-wired to treat financial loss as a life-threatening predator. This is why, when faced with the decision to implement a new financial technology or solution that has a cost, but the potential for significant value, we either: FIGHT: Deny the information being presented and convince ourselves that the cost of change is too expensive. Example: “I could hire another head count for that price, no thanks.” FREEZE: Get stuck and do nothing. Example: “I can see the value and agree something should be done, but we’re not in a position to Read More