A healthy cash flow fuelled by a timely payment process lies at the heart of any thriving business. Financial income streams are typically managed through accounts receivable, ensuring that businesses collect payments due to them by customers on the correct date and for the agreed amount.
Accounts receivable has historically been a manual process, with accounts teams organising and managing payments from initiation to completion. A manual process inevitably slows an organisation down, as there is likely to be some inefficiencies and the potential for error delaying the whole payment process.
Manual operations, especially in the financial sectors of your enterprise, could not only be hampering your workflow but also costing you significant amounts of money. Research conducted within the last two years points to manual processes costing organisations around 25% of their revenue.
As a result, it seems essential for organisations to integrate efficient solutions, including payment automation, into their systems in order to improve accounts receivable processes and enhance cash flow for greater access to growth and opportunity.
Contents
- What’s included in payment automation?
- How payment automation improves the accounts receivable process.
- Streamline your accounts receivable process with Interbacs.
What’s included in payment automation?
In terms of accounts receivable, automation is transforming processing methodology and overall results. The right payment automation software can provide powerful tools to improve accounts receivable processing and generate substantial efficiency benefits.
Effective automation in an accounts receivable process will typically include:
-
Automated workflows
Scheduled notifications and follow-ups enable payments to be delivered on time and help customers to avoid payment delays with useful alerts around payment due dates and agreed transaction amounts.
-
Payment reconciliation
Payment automation improves accounts receivable processing by matching incoming payments to customers, updating data sets and keeping track of changes to payment information.
-
Payment reporting
The ability to track payments with valuable insights provided through reports, such as those provided by Bacs around Bacs payments, is key to accounting transparency and accuracy. Important metrics can be monitored and payment trends are available for analysis, creating greater visibility across the payment system.
-
Financial system integration
The correct payment solution will integrate easily and quickly into your existing accounting and internal systems. This allows consistent data availability for approved stakeholders and minimises manual intervention within payment processing for substantial time and cost savings.
How payment automation improves accounts receivable process
There are multiple measurable benefits to improving accounts receivable process with payment automation, including:
-
Enhanced productivity
When repetitive tasks are automated and are no longer completed manually, your teams can work on strategic projects to boost business productivity. Data entry is automated and payment administration is accelerated decreasing the amount of time spent on payment processing.
-
Improved compliance
Automation has been proved to reduce the possibility of error in payment processing. When payment inaccuracies are reduced, it becomes easier to meet compliance regulations for greater transparency, increased trust and stronger brand reputation.
Organisations with integrated payment processing automation say this helps reduce error, with 63% of surveyed businesses revealing automation has minimised errors in their payment systems, helping to avoid costly delays or missed deadlines.
-
Strengthened decision making
With real-time insights and strategic information provided through payment automation solutions, your business is able to review actionable data for more strategic decision making and optimised goal setting.
In order to stay ahead of challenges and lead in a competitive market, access to predictive analytics helps to pinpoint potential issues, track trends and reveal fresh opportunities to expand your business.
Streamline your accounts receivable process with solutions from Interbacs
Accounts receivable automation is already transforming the organisational and operational prospects of many financial businesses and institutions, gaining higher levels of transparency, efficiency and accuracy.
By optimising B2B payments for operational excellence with our powerful payment solutions, your organisation will strengthen processes, systems and goal setting capabilities.
Here at Interbacs, our Bacs approved software and services are ideal for businesses that need reliable, secure payment processing. Whether you're a small business or a large corporation, we have the expertise to support your needs.
Why not find out more from our friendly team? Contact Interbacs today for a personalised consultation and discover how we can optimise your payment processes.
