By optimizing Revenue Cycle processes, substantial efficiencies and improvements will lead to real, quantifiable bottom-line savings realized, particularly those involving cash management and capital allocation. By working directly with your finance staff in looking at the stages of your Revenue Cycle, we can see how well you’re managing money, and we can make necessary changes to rapidly translate bottom-line benefits.

Our experience has shown us that Revenue Cycle inefficiencies can often be linked to slow, inaccurate, and poorly defined paper-based workflow and capture processes. The results are typical of re-work when processing duplicate invoices with the risk of significant overpayments, ‘lost’ vendor payment discounts, poor working capital management, and an ineffective vendor feedback experience when querying the status of an invoice.

Once we start with a Revenue Cycle Optimization engagement, we value and understand the importance of change management and the culture within your organization. Technological and people-driven processes need to be managed effectively; new technologies such as API, Robotic Process Automation, and others can be intimidating. Our experience allows us to provide leadership and manage the changes within your organization with minimal impact on people. Furthermore, KPI’s and reporting tools are implemented to ensure that once the solutions are deployed as per the plan, there is no reversal to any legacy systems or solutions.

The key to having a healthy balance sheet and positive cash flow is to have a robust Accounts Receivable Process. Being able to correctly bill and collect in an accurate, effective, timely manner is the lifeblood of a business.

As we work with your firm to improve your A/R processes and install both proven guiding principles and best in class practices, a robust set of policies must be in place that detail your collections practice, time limits, customer credit requirements, KPI’s, personnel performance measures (to include accuracy), and accountability-empowerment for resolution at pre-defined dollar amount limits. A Purchase Order Policy required around all customer contracts should be strictly enforced, in addition to rating your customers’ credit and payment histories, credit limits, and pre-pay requirements to align with your billing and collections policies. It is truly a team effort, and there must be internal alignment to enforce terms in a courteous but firm manner.

Combined, our implementation expertise and your use of A/R and collections best practices will become keys to optimizing both profitability and customer satisfaction. In addition to electronic invoicing, having a current billing system, and putting in place a methodology to review collections problem codes will allow you to take appropriate action, as well as being able to monitor receivables aging by total and by customer. Our goal is to apply our expertise, best practices and analytical tools to advance your cash flow and working capital.

Managing the Accounts Payable process is critical for effective cash flow management. An effective A/P process involves all stakeholders spending money on behalf of the company, and it requires an alignment between procurement and the A/P department. Both departments must work together; the Purchasing department is responsible for establishing a procurement policy based on the spending profile of the company that goes beyond purchases. It also must include goods receipts with timelines and invoice handling in case of paper invoices. An insufficient process can lead to missed discounts or and even impact on the company’s overall credit score rating.

By mapping out the entire process, our experience helps us segment the issues and quickly determine root causes. As we evaluate the process, we also look at the level of technology currently in use so that along with the new solutions, new technologies are deployed.

During the analysis stage, we look for common problems such as data issues due to entry, slow or inconsistent processing, approval lags, disappearing invoices, payment errors causing duplicate payments over and underpayments, inefficient fraud prevention, cumbersome processes, a high percentage of paper records, a high number of exception invoices, labor-intensive follow up, and weak encryption or security.
Human error in data entry is one of the most widespread issues found in accounts payable, and it’s not a shallow one. Studies of organizational management cite erroneous data-entry occurrences exist in nearly 88 percent of manual accounts-payable documents, with the potential to backlog an entire department. That’s 88 percent of spreadsheets with incorrect values, dates or percentages alongside wrongly inputted formulas and inaccurate final calculations. Data entry issues caused by human error can be reduced through “smart” software that automatically reads and inputs invoice values. Since this sort of problem can occur at nearly any stage of payable processes that involve typing, software that decreases manual typing will, consequently, reduce risk.

Processing invoices can be a frustrating and cumbersome task without some facet of an automated system. What’s more, in large accounts payable departments, personnel may be unaware of the comprehensive process, be overwhelmed by the number of invoices or even take liberties with them. With our help, we can introduce and deploy new technologies such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR), Robotic Process Automation (RPA), and Central E-Repository that manages and digitally verifies each processing step. We can also introduce customizable workflow routes to reduce approval lags, control account codes for all vendors, and Application Programming Interface (API).