July 2018 - IntelliChief

How to Reduce DSO: 7 Strategies for Better Accounts Receivable Management

July 25, 2018

You’ve run the numbers, looked at previous metrics, and realized that your DSO is higher than it should be. You may be seeing the impact on your day-to-day cash flow, or you could simply be trying to get ahead of future problems. Either way, you’re looking to reduce your DSO – and the following strategies can help you get there.

Step 1: Set Realistic DSO Targets

In a perfect world, customers would pay right away. But, the reality is, most companies need several days – if not several weeks – to collect and verify their invoices, get approvals, and schedule payments.

To decide on a target DSO, you’ll want to consider the average for your industry, as well as how long it typically takes your company to convert receivables into cash. (This article takes a deeper look at using your DSO as a KPI.)

If your current days sales outstanding is 90+, you won’t be able to get to 30 days overnight. A more reasonable initial goal is an improvement of 10-15 percent. That means reducing your DSO to 77-81 days if you’re currently at 90 days, or getting to 51-54 days if you’re currently at 60. Once you’ve met this initial target, you can re-evaluate your cash flow and decide if you still need to improve.

Step 2: Review Your Payment Terms

A typical guideline for accounts receivable management: your DSO should be within 15-20 percent of your stated payment terms. Once you’ve figured out how much you need to reduce your days sales outstanding, you can re-evaluate your payment terms to make sure they align.

When looking at your payment terms, you’ll want to look at more than just the period of time that your buyer has to pay the amount that’s due. You can also look at:

Early payment incentives (such as a 1 or 2 percent discount for paying within 10 or 15 days)
Late payment penalties
How you’re asking to be paid (electronic options let you access payments right away, instead of waiting several days for a check to come in the mail – although some of your customers might not be willing to adopt new technologies)

Step 3: Get Better at Credit Risk Management

Your payment terms go hand in hand with your credit practices – which are equally important to consider when you need to reduce your DSO. If you’re too lenient, you take on a greater financial risk – but if you’re too strict, you may be missing out on potential business.

When you review your credit policy, be sure to consider:

Your company’s overall financial risk tolerances
What criteria customers need to meet to be approved for credit
How you plan to process each application (e.g. using a third-party company for a B2B credit check, or requesting more references from new customers)
How you plan to resolve delinquent accounts (from preliminary communications through collections)

You’ll also want to consider whether credit policy changes could actually increase your DSO, rather than reduce it. For instance, if you add more paperwork or more extensive credit checks to your process, you’ll likely spend more time on accounts receivable management upfront. However, if the time you spend on this step is less than the amount of time (and money) you’d spend dealing with delinquent accounts, it may be worth the trade-off.

And remember: you don’t have to decline business from customers you deem too risky. Instead, you can consider options like pre-payment, cash on delivery, or a partial up-front deposit.

Step 4: Improve Your Invoicing Practices

Once you know how you plan to reduce your DSO, you’ll need to communicate your new policies very clearly to your customers. That may mean updating your invoice template to put the due date and preferred method of payment front and center.

There’s also the issue of getting delivered to the customer right away. (After all, if your customer hasn’t received an invoice yet, there’s nothing for them to pay!)

If you currently wait for customers to receive their purchases before you send your invoices, you could start sending invoices after each order has shipped. You could also consider emailing your invoices to speed up the process even further.

There’s also the option of automating your invoices, but we’ll get into automation a bit further on.

Step 5: Improve Your Collections Practices

Even though most customers pay on time (and those miss the first deadline do usually follow through in the end), companies still need to have a documented debt recovery policy in place. This ensures that you know what to do in a worst-case scenario (and that you spend as few resources as possible on the process.)

One of the most common customer responses on a collection call is “I never got that invoice, can you send it to me?” Employees then have to get off the phone, reprint the invoice, re-scan it, and re-email it out. Implementing an enterprise content management system can give the user access to the invoice while the customer is on the phone, and the customer can receive the invoice immediately. This allows the AR team an opportunity to come up with a payment plan for the customer right then.

For the most part, one or two friendly reminders are usually enough to get a customer to address an unpaid invoice. (Be sure to keep complete documentation of all your communication attempts – in the event that you do need to send the account to a collections agency, this will make the process smoother.) But, if multiple reminders go unanswered, it may be easiest to turn the account over to the pros. That way, you can go back to focusing on more financially valuable accounts.

Step 6: Increase Visibility

Reducing DSOs is a collaborative effort. Credit managers, financial analysts, and CFOs all have their own role in the process – and they all need real-time information to make more informed decisions.

An unpaid invoice report is a great place to start – but they’ll need to look much deeper to get to the bottom of your high days sales outstanding. Visibility is crucial; your team needs to know which customers are late to pay, whether there’s any correlation with your company’s sales patterns, and whether you’re doing anything internally to hold up the process. If you don’t already have a reporting process in place, consider investing more heavily in a system that’ll let you create a more accurate cash flow forecast.

Step 7: Consider Automation for Effortless Accounts Receivable Management

At the end of the day, managing your receivables is a time-consuming process. Anything you can do to make it easier can have a positive impact on your cash flow.

AR automation is one way that you can speed things up. Instead of having an employee create invoices, confirm each company’s billing information, and print and send your paperwork, you can let an automated system handle everything for you by processing documents through programmed workflows.

Companies that automate their order to cash processes are usually able to reduce their DSOs within a few months. Their customers get their invoices faster, don’t have to worry about duplicate charges, and spend less time contacting customer service. Internally, these companies can eliminate repetitive processes and free up their Accounts Receivable team to work on more important projects.

Let IntelliChief Help You Reduce Your DSO and Improve Your Accounts Receivable Performance

Ready to improve your approach to Accounts Receivable management? IntelliChief can help. Our business process optimization team can help you automate your most time-consuming workflows. We’ll recommend ways for you to reduce your DSO, increase your cash flow, and process your receivables with less effort from your team.

Are you ready to work smarter, not harder? IntelliChief can help. For more information, contact us today.

5 Ways to Speed Up Customer Order Processing

July 18, 2018

Customer order processing is incredibly time-consuming. When you’re dealing with hundreds of orders at a time, it’s easy to feel like there’s no end in sight.

That said, there are quite a few ways for you to speed up operations. For instance, you can:

1. Standardize Your Order Forms

If you take online orders, your customers can hand-select everything they want. But, if they phone in an order, they’re depending on your team to get everything right.

Your online order form may be different than your mail order form, or the internal form you use when you talk with a customer on the phone. If crucial information is left out, that can hold up the process.

Take the time to standardize your order forms, and you’ll find that customer order processing becomes easier – no matter how that order is collected.

2. Automatically Capture All Customer Orders

You can’t start processing your customer orders until they’re officially in your system. So what’s your process for getting them there?

You may have streamlined EDI processes for your larger clients (perhaps around 20 percent of your base), but you can’t forget about the other 80 percent of customers whose orders are still being manually processed. In most cases, those orders that are faxed or emailed to your organization represent an even larger portion of your company’s revenue.

Automating the capture process for orders as they come into your organization can eliminate lost orders, duplicate orders, and printing cost entirely. By capturing orders directly at the source, you can also reduce your lead time.

3. Automate the Process From Start to Finish

If you’re doing everything you can to get orders into your system quickly and accurately, but still aren’t meeting your desired metrics, you can always consider sales order automation. Technology can speed up order processing quite a bit, handling time-consuming administrative duties so your employees can focus on more important tasks.

With automation, you can have your email and fax systems automatically monitored for inbound orders. Then, those purchase orders can be imported into your order management system to create a sales order for each customer.

Even with automation, customer order processing still requires employee input. Advanced solutions can compare information with your ERP, allowing them to automatically cross reference part numbers, confirm prices, and read quantities. But, when something doesn’t match or is incorrect, the program asks a customer service representative for confirmation. This allows CSR’s to focus on resolving critical errors (instead of monotonous tasks like order entry).

There’s also the benefit of machine learning. Once a CSR corrects an error, the software can remember that correction for next time. Teaching your system what you need translates to faster and more accurate order processing.

4. Make Multi-Department Collaboration Easier

It’s always nice to deal with stock items and returning customers. But, it’s not always that simple.

When you deal in made-to-order products, certain orders may need to be reviewed by engineering, quality control, or several other departments before you can confirm pricing or verify lead time.

Getting these multi-step orders from department to department is often easier said than done. If all the necessary departments are in the same location, you can print the orders out and take them where they need to go. But, there’s always the chance that the paperwork gets misplaced, forgotten, or buried in a pile of other requests. If you want to go the email route, you can save a bit of time, but you end up with cluttered inboxes and requests that often get missed.

Automation can save you time here as well. It’s possible to set up electronic workflows for customer order processing, giving each team access to the documents they need, when they need them. When one person is done with their task, the most up-to-date version of the document goes directly to the next step – and so on until that order is complete.

This takes the “tribal knowledge” out of customer order processing. (For instance, certain employees may know exactly what the process is for a specific order type, even if it isn’t part of your company’s documentation.) And, because you’re standardizing the process, you’re able to capture data for reports and analytics that show you how you’re doing in real-time.

5. Keep Streamlined Records for Better Customer Service

Your job doesn’t end when an order is shipped. Your team still deals with customer inquiries and collections, putting even more on their busy to-do list.

To help keep customers and auditors happy, you’ll want to keep your records as organized as possible. Ideally, you’ll have a complete archive of every purchase each customer has made as well as the history of every event in the order process. (Even better if that archive is electronic and fully searchable.)

This lets you tell customers what stage of the order process they’re in at any point in time. It also helps you proactively communicate issues, like out-of-stock items, to keep your customers informed. (As an added bonus, your collections team will also have access to the entire history of a transaction, including invoices, to help reduce your DSOs.)

Get Expert Advice for Faster Customer Order Processing

Ready to manage your orders more effectively? IntelliChief can help. We offer automated order processing solutions that can streamline your entire order-to-cash process.

Contact us today to find out if automation is right for you. Or, to see how other customers have improved their order processing workflows with IntelliChief, visit our Resource Library for a peer-to-peer case study.

Improving Your Order to Cash Cycle in Oracle

July 12, 2018

Your order to cash cycle determines how quickly you process your orders, how soon you get paid, and how much money you can re-invest in your business. A long cycle is a sign that you’re not operating as efficiently as possible. This can be frustrating – especially if you’re already using Oracle to manage your workflows. But with a few strategic changes, you can produce better metrics. One way to improve your order to cash cycle in Oracle? Order entry and sales order processing automation, made possible by IntelliChief.

Oracle Order to Cash Overview

Any processes that occur after a customer has sent a purchase order fall under the “order to cash” umbrella.

Order to Cash Cycle in Oracle

In Oracle, the order to cash cycle starts when you enter a new transaction into your Order Management Sales Order module. At this point, you can also:

Enter custom pricing and tax information
Apply discounts
Update a customer’s payment information
Update a customer’s shipment information

As you move from order entry to order fulfillment, you’ll also move to the Shipping Execution module. You’ll:

Put the requested items on hold
Create a pack slip
Set departure dates
Set up secondary shipments for backordered items
Calculate weight, volume, and fill percentages for your logistics team
Assign freight charges
Define container details

Once the order has shipped, Oracle notifies your customer. You can then use the Order Management module to track the delivery and manage returns.

Billing, which is done in Oracle Receivables, is the last step of the order to cash cycle. You can use the Receipts Workbench, Transactions Workbench, and Collections Workbench for the final O2C workflows. In these modules, you’ll enter receipts, create and send invoices, post payments, and add transactions to your general ledger.

Automating Key Steps in Your Oracle Order to Cash Process Flow

With so many steps to complete, it’s easy see where delays can occur. Many companies have issues routing orders and receipts from one department to the next. This is especially true for complex orders that move through Engineering, R&D, and Quality before they’re eventually sent out.

While you can’t automate the entire order to cash cycle in Oracle, you can streamline the most time- and labor-intensive steps. In fact, you can even have certain processes completed without any input from your employees. For example, you can have IntelliChief send new orders straight to Credit without Customer Service having to manually pass them along.

Our order to cash solutions communicate behind the scenes with your Oracle ERP. In doing so, our system can automatically:

Oracle O2C Automation Software

With IntelliChief, you’re able to keep your existing workflows in place. For instance, you can have your customers continue emailing, faxing, and mailing you their orders. But, with automation helping you out, you can avoid the routine administrative work that’s needed to move each order through to completion.

For O2C processes that do need a user’s attention, automatic notifications also make sure nothing falls through the cracks. When nobody is stuck wondering what they’re supposed to be doing, your orders are completed faster and with fewer mistakes.

Benefits of an Automated Order to Cash Cycle in Oracle

Automating your Oracle workflows with IntelliChief helps you significantly reduce your order to cash cycle times. You can start processing each order right away, instead of waiting for a customer service member to enter them in. And, you can send invoices as soon as an order is complete, avoiding collection delays that complicate your cash flow.

Automation also helps you scale your order to cash processes without having to hire new employees. The teams you already have in place can take on new (and more valuable) work as well.

Another benefit: any time you need a document while you’re working in Oracle, you can retrieve it through IntelliChief. You don’t have to switch over to a different screen, helping reduce disruptions so that you can stay productive. Similarly, when customers reach out with questions, you can access their entire order history directly from your app. Customer service becomes much faster and less of a burden.

Discover IntelliChief’s O2C Solutions for Oracle

IntelliChief is designed as an end-to-end O2C solution. This means that you can use it to streamline as much of the process as you like. You can start with one specific area – like sales order management. Or, you can automate the entire Oracle order to cash process all at once. And, with the detailed reports that IntelliChief collects, you can visualize key ways to improve operations throughout your entire organization. This includes everything from supply chain management to inventory management.

Ready to improve your order to cash cycle in Oracle? Our experts can review your O2C workflows and introduce you to our Oracle document management solutions. We’ve helped countless E-Business Suite users just like you leverage the power of automation – and we’ll use that extensive technical knowledge to your benefit throughout implementation and beyond.

To learn more about how you can improve your order to cash cycle in Oracle, contact IntelliChief today. We also offer customized demos tailored to the needs of your business. To request a free demo, click here.

Improving Your SAP Sales Order Process Flow

July 9, 2018

Tired of your time-consuming, inefficient SAP sales order process flow? There’s an easy way to speed it up: IntelliChief.

We get it: Manually entering every single purchase order into SAP takes a lot of valuable resources – resource that you just may not have. Plus, not every transaction can be completed through EDI (your customers, for instance, just may not have the technology for it). You also have to worry about data entry errors, lost/duplicate orders, and communication delays.

If you need a better order processing strategy, automation may be the key. IntelliChief’s sales order automation software makes your SAP order to cash process simple and stress-free (not to mention much more accurate).

SAP Sales Order Process Flow – The Traditional Way

Traditionally, you have to monitor each of your communication channels (email, fax, phone, and mail) to collect inbound orders. From there, you have to manually enter them into SAP, specifying the customer, item numbers (and quantities), and billing & shipping information. (This is most commonly done in your SAP CRM.)

Order Confirmation

From there, your CRM communicates with your APO to make sure each item is available to ship. Your APO collects warehousing information, availability dates, and shipping information, then creates an unchecked delivery as a preview of the actual order.

At this point in the process, you may decide to send your customers an order confirmation notice. If any of the items in their order are temporarily out of stock, you’ll likely let them know about a potential delay.

Order Fulfillment, Shipment, & Billing

When your fulfillment team has the order picked, packed, and ready to go, SAP changes the order from an unchecked delivery to a checked delivery. If cross-docking is involved, the system adds the information, and the order is processed through each of the receiving warehouses.

Once the order has been filled, SAP creates your inbound and outbound delivery documents. Your team will typically save these documents into your customer’s file in case they’re needed in the future.

Depending on your internal policies, you may send additional communications to your customer when their order has shipped (or is out for delivery). You’ll then pass everything over to Accounts Receivable, who can bill the customer for their order.

SAP Sales Order Process Flow

The SAP Sales Order Process Flow with IntelliChief

While SAP helps streamline these workflows on its own, there’s still quite a bit of work involved for your team. IntelliChief is designed to take the extra steps out of the process.

Our sales order processing software helps you automatically:

Capture customer purchase orders
Create corresponding sales orders
Send the sales order to each of the various departments that are involved with fulfillment
Capture credit memos
Enter and process change orders
Send out order updates
Send invoices via email/fax
Confirm each order’s payment status
Provide increased visibility into the collections process

Plus, every document that’s created as an order is processed is automatically saved to a searchable archive. If a customer contacts you for an update, you’ll be able to see exactly where their order is and when it’s expected to arrive.

Smarter Order Management, Better Cash Flow

With a better approach to SAP order management, you’ll save both time and money, improving your organization’s cash flow and reduce lead time. You’ll spend less time on low-value order entry tasks, and your workflows will move more smoothly. Plus, increased visibility into each order’s status lets you make faster, more informed decisions and provide better support to your customers. It’s a smart solution all around – and you can learn more here.

Talk to the Experts in SAP Order Automation

When you invest in an automation solution for SAP, you need to have an experienced team on your side. As a trusted leader in SAP order automation, IntelliChief can customize your integration so you can make the most of your existing workflows. And because we’ve handled countless projects just like yours, we can take all the stress out of deployment.

Want to schedule a custom demo? Contact IntelliChief today to learn how to start improving your SAP sales order process flow.

How Does Your Sales Order Processing Procedure Measure Up?

July 6, 2018

Every company has its own approach to sales order processing. Some start working on sales orders the second they come in. Others collect and distribute orders in batches once or twice per day. Those orders can then be routed electronically from one department to the next, or they can be moved through manually. So: how does your sales order processing procedure measure up?

Order Processing Metrics

According to the American Productivity & Quality Center, the average company spends $24.21 to process a sales order.

Sales Order Processing Procedure

Often, a company’s order processing costs go hand-in-hand with their order processing methods. Companies that process each order by hand spend more; companies that use automation spend less. The APQC estimates that a company that spends $21 to process an order the traditional way could spend just $6 with the help of automation.

Then there’s the issue of time. Many orders take days – if not a week or more – to fully process. That’s not too surprising when you think about how many people are involved. (Think customer service reps, credit managers, packers, shippers, and accounts receivable clerks.) Each person plays a crucial role, but projects often get held up going from one department to the next and lead time increases.

Signs You Need to Improve Your Order Processing Workflow

If you’re thinking about making changes to your order processing procedures, take a look at your metrics in the following areas:

Average Time to Order Entry. How much time passes from the moment an order is received to the time it’s entered into your order management system? (You can also look at this metric for each of your individual order channels: phone, email, mail, and fax.)
Average Time to Order Fulfillment (Lead Time). How long does the entire order fulfillment process take? (This includes approving the order internally, confirming the financial details, collecting and shipping the items, and sending the customer an invoice.)
Order Entry Error Percentage. What percentage of your orders get delayed by an error entry mistake (such as an incorrect billing address or price)?

Your percentage of returning customers is worth considering as well. While many things – not just order processing performance – influence repeat business, this metric can help you determine how well you’re meeting your customers’ expectations. If they receive their orders quickly (and correctly), they’re more likely to come back.

What Can You Achieve With a Better Sales Order Processing Procedure?

Let’s go back to the cost example above: $21 to process a sales order the traditional way, and $6 to process a sales order with the help of automation. That savings of $15 per sales order translates to $15,000 in savings for every 1,000 orders processed. For a company that processes 1,000 orders a month, that’s $180,000 a year – just through lower processing costs. And, when your customer service reps aren’t wasting time on manual data entry, they can focus on projects that actually add to your bottom line.

Improve Your Sales Order Processes With IntelliChief

If you’re ready to start working more efficiently, IntelliChief is here to help. Our order to cash automation software can:

Automatically convert purchase orders into sales orders (no manual data entry needed)
Enter those sales orders into your order processing system
Instantly route documents from one department to the next (e.g., from customer service to credit or engineering)
Create invoices for you to send your customers at the end of each transaction

These faster and more efficient processes can completely transform your order to cash cycle. To talk with one of our experts about improving your sales order processing procedure, contact us today.