Accounts receivable isn’t often the first thought that comes to mind when you’re trying to climb the CFO ladder. Tucked away in the back office, this important function rarely gets the attention it deserves. And often it isn’t top of the list for the drinks invites.  

But automating your accounts receivable is an easy, fast and cost-effective way to stand out from your peers and shift your career up a gear.  

While automation can be daunting, it’s a forward-thinking, digitisation project to lead. And one that is sure to deliver strong results for your company. Who wouldn’t want to fly the flag for a project like that.  

To advance within your company or step up in a new one, ideally you want to show that you can:  

• lead an effective finance team  
• deliver what the Executive team need 
• enhance customer experience  
• improve cash flow  

Automating your collections process ticks all these boxes. 

Lead a loyal and productive finance team  

Accounts receivable can be full of manual tasks. Timing reminders correctly, squeezing in phone calls when there’s a spare five minutes, writing up notes from payment talks with customers, pulling and manipulating data for reports. The list of follow-up tasks is endless. 

Automated collections technology can streamline the process. The entry cost is low and the ROI high. And there’s enough choice in the market to suit all budgets, business models and accounting systems.  

Reducing the manual processes of AR will increase team productivity. With mundane, repetitive tasks no longer taking up your team’s time, they’ll be able to focus on high-value work and enabling the business to grow.  

It’s also a safe bet that after pushing the most time-consuming tasks to an automated process you’ll have a team that’s happier and more engaged in their work, meaning they’ll be easier to retain. 

Get the leadership team on side

The monthly reporting headache. It takes time to collate data and deliver insight. Depending on your ERP and tech stack, the data can be muddled. Frequently, key data is spread across different systems (or worse, spreadsheets). When questions are asked, they’re often not answered with complete confidence in the numbers.  

Automating your accounts receivables gives you a live dashboard of how your AR is tracking. Debtor data and KPIs are available at a glance. You can be the game changer. Provide robust analysis on cash flow. Easily visualise debtor trends and understand your AR efficiency. Help the company grow.  

If this doesn’t win you friends around the board table… 

Enhance the customer experience  

Marketing and finance sometimes aren’t the best of friends. Marketing likes to spend money. Finance wants to see ROI, like yesterday.  

Automating your collections process is a quick, low-cost way to ensure a better customer experience. And this is something marketing teams are very keen on.   

Automation delivers a clear AR process for both the business and customer. You’re able to deliver clear, consistent communications to customers about their invoices. They understand exactly what they need to pay, how they can pay and by when. Reminders are not ad hoc, and their regularity helps get your customers into a routine of paying on time (or in advance if you’re lucky).  

If you’ve got a more complex customer base, automation can help you tailor messaging to suit different customer types without burdening your team with hours of extra work. Simply set up the templates, ensure your customers are segmented into the right workflows and your job is done. The automated solution takes care of the rest.   

Tone can also be altered to match the urgency of the situation as late payments become more overdue. Again, all from templates so no additional time is spent working out what message to send to which client, when.  

The payment process can be the last chance to make an impression on your client before they become a loyal repeat customer – or go looking elsewhere. With an automated collections process, you can be confident that the experience will be a good one. 

Cash is King  

If winning over colleagues wasn’t enough, we haven’t even mentioned the obvious. Cash flow.  

AR automation is one of the easiest ways to improve cash flow fast. With an automated system running the manual, repetitive tasks, invoices don’t slip through cracks. All debtors are chased no matter how large or small the outstanding amount.   

And with regular reminders, communication from customers is often improved. Disputes are raised faster, meaning they can be resolved faster – and the invoice paid promptly.  

With the repetitive being taken care of, your finance team will be more productive and human error reduced. They’ll be able to give personal attention to accounts that need that extra push to get paid. They’ll have time to work more strategically on insights and ultimately your cost to collect will be reduced and the business will have the time and cash to grow. 

If you’re keen to lead the automation charge for your business and boost your career, then talk to us about automating your accounts receivables from pre-reminders right through to your AR performance data. CreditorWatch Collect is a quick to set up, easy to use cost-effective tool that automates your credit control so your team can get back to focusing on high-value work and delivering growth.