The Secret to Helping Your Customers Pay on Time

OmPrompt

The Secret to Helping Your Customers Pay on Time

2| OmPrompt - The Secret to Helping Your Customers Pay On Time

If “finance is the language of business”

today, then automation is finance’s smart-phone; fast, capable of numerous tasks,

and efficient.Aberdeen Group

The Secret to Helping Your Customers Pay On Time - OmPrompt | 3

Heads do not roll in the accounts department if their money is not spent before it needs to be – far from it.

Sadly, some companies are only too happy to find some excuse to pay late, have invoices resubmitted – or simply ‘play for time’ with the money they owe for the purchases you’ve delivered.

That said, it’s not all doom and gloom – and there’s no need to become paranoid… Instead, try to see it from your customers’ perspective. They can’t pay invoices that aren’t correct, especially if they don’t match up with what happened down the line, earlier in the order-to-cash cycle (O2C).Here’s what you can do to help speed up the process and get paid on time…

There aren’t many organisations in the world that are ridden with guilt if they don’t pay your invoices on time.


Reduce Input ErrorsEarly Mistakes Cause Big ProblemsMistakes across the whole order-to-cash process are compounded: so the earlier errors occur, the worse it becomes.

However, early, accurate order processing greatly reduces issues further down the line – all of which could have led to late payment. What’s more, eliminating mistakes at the front end allows you to see where the cracks are showing in other parts of your supply chain, such as potential problems in picking and packing or logistics, for example.

Additionally, one of the main reasons that invoices aren’t paid on time is because of claims - the disparity between what was ordered and what was (perceived to be) delivered. Customer Automation Management helps organisations like Arla to resolve those claims quickly which leads to quicker payment.

Find Your Mistakes Before They DoIt’s always far better to find your own mistake than let someone else find it. Customers obviously only pay if everything is in order.

So, assuming your order entry and fulfilment processes are up to scratch, the goods delivered correspond with the original purchase order (PO), as well as with your invoice.

If you combine this by automatically checking invoices and any claims or delivery documents against POs at your end, before you send it to the client, it saves the customer time and builds their confidence in you.

Automated solutions, like OmPrompt, can help you do this.


Reduce Input Errors: SummaryRemoving the potential for errors at the start by removing the need to enter data directly helps to reduce your days sales outstanding (DSO). Moreover, automation solutions enable greater visibility and easy online tracking within your order processing system so that sifting through piles of paperwork to cross-check original orders becomes a thing of the past. Being efficient is obviously good for your business, and it may also increase your customers’ confidence in you, overall.

The Benefits of Automation:• You can find and check and correct any

errors before your customers find them

• You can build accuracy into your invoicing strategy, right from the beginning

• Early, accurate processing greatly reduces the complexity of issues arising further down the line

• It saves your customers time, and builds their confidence in you

• So you can stop wasting time chasing errors and focus on other business improvement areas instead.

Here’s what our customer, a global dairy company, Arla had to say:

The output from OmPrompt was highly accurate and error free, identifying manual data entry errors we didn’t even know we had.


Improve Your AccuracyTracking Should Facilitate Swift Payment – not Hinder itAutomation allows rapid and accurate tracking of all documents - with no lost Purchase Orders (POs) sitting somewhere on a desk. This gives you complete visibility; amendments, particulars, specifications, dates and requests, are visible.

So rather than being a distressing task, accurate invoicing becomes a ‘facilitating’ task, helping you to keep right on top of the order-to-cash cycle. Needless to say, visibility is your most potent tool when dealing with a customer who is delaying payment for whatever reason.

Efficiency Starts and Ends with Your BusinessFor a major supplier, a 0.05% mistake percentage can cost millions down the line, so a willingness to accept errors is probably costing far more than you think. Despite this, many supply companies see a degree of ‘inaccuracy’ as somehow acceptable - or even inevitable – and this shouldn’t be the case.

With online order processing, accuracy and visibility becomes the norm: allowing you to concentrate on other potential problems in your supply chain that may need attention.

Our full end-to-end automation solution can link up processes across your supply chain to increase visibility of transactions, reduce manual effort and identify and escalate exceptions proactively. End-to-end automation helps you reduce your cost to serve, deliver better customer experience and identify opportunities for improvement.


Improve Your AccuracyYour Customer Actually Wants Fast, Accurate Invoices from You! Suppliers may actually want to pay quickly and enjoy any early payment discount you offer; but if your invoicing is subject to inaccuracies or delays brought about by the way you receive and process their orders, they have no choice but to double-check your invoices, which is often the main reason for delays.

It means they aren’t able to complete their payment runs promptly and accurately, and you are paid late: making it a lose/lose situation.

Accuracy Doesn’t Always Equal Efficiency!Even if your current system appears to be accurate and has a low proportion of errors – it may simply still be too slow to be truly efficient!

Remember, your invoicing procedures need to be both swift and accurate – one without the other still leads to late payments.

If you can send your invoices to your customers as soon as an item has been delivered successfully, you’re getting it into their payment cycle faster, your number of days sales outstanding (DSO) will be reduced and you’ll receive the money in the bank sooner.


Improve Your Accuracy: SummaryHe who pays the piper calls the tune, which means that your customer is entitled to expect you to be accurate at every stage of the order-to-cash process, no matter how randomly they interact with you. What’s more, even if your business is willing to accept a certain percentage of mistakes as normal, you also have to consider how these mistakes are impacting your clients. Instead, if you automated one (or all) of the stages of your order-to-cash process your customers would be happy to know that you are doing everything you can, to make your supply chain 100% effective.

The Benefits of Automation:• By sending your invoices to your

customers as soon as an item has been delivered successfully, you’re getting it into their payment cycle faster

• You can ensure the rapid and accurate tracking of all documents

• There will be no lost purchase orders (POs)

• With automation tools in place, communications, conversations and messages are instantly recallable online for future reference

• You can receive money in the bank sooner

• And your number of days sales outstanding (DSO) will be reduced.

Here’s what our customer, a global food company, had to say:

OmPrompt provides a lot more than order automation, which is what they are best known for. They have helped Arla successfully streamline a number of transactional processes including: claims processing and validation, as well as delivery visibility.


Your Customers Aren’t to Blame!Just because orders come to your customer service teams in a variety of inefficient formats, doesn’t mean you can’t handle them efficiently.

Even if your customer has a very haphazard way of ordering from you, say with faxes, phone calls – even carrier pigeons – you can still convert all of these incoming media into one electronic format and put it into your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems using Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) or any other file transfer protocol you like.

Customer Automation Management makes the processing of orders (and indeed, any other supply chain-related transactions) faster, it will help to eliminate/reduce any confusion or errors, and it makes for swift order tracking – and easier, faster invoicing.

Make it Easy for ThemPeople and systems are often changing within your customer’s organisation – and the bigger they are the more they change.

Embrace their diversity!

Don’t rely on the knowledge in people’s heads; put information into a system like OmPrompt Customer Automation Management, so you can provide excellent customer experience – even when key resources are off sick or on holiday.

With all your customer information in one place you can spot trends and even inform them if they’ve missed a cut-off time or could reduce their number of shipments.

Your system should adapt so that your customers don’t have to! For example, find out what information they require on documents; confirm how often they would like to receive invoices. And bear in mind that the easier you make it for them to process documents of any kind – the easier it is for them to do business with you and pay you – on time in full!

Consider Your Customers


Consider Your Customers: SummaryLate payments may be a headache for you, but an ineffi cient supply chain is also a major headache for your customers. They rely on you to deliver their goods on ti me. A special promoti on that runs out of steam or fails to start on ti me because of supply chain defi ciencies benefi ts nobody. The moral is, the more you can help your customers the more they’ll be willing to help you.

The Benefi ts of Automation:• The easier you make it for your

customers, the easier it is for them to do business with you and pay you - on ti me in full!

• OmPrompt gives you the tools to reduce the ti me it takes to deliver your invoice from days to possibly minutes by automati ng the enti re order-to-cash process.

• If they receive invoices promptly, your customers are able to gain from any early incenti ve schemes you off er

• If invoices are right the fi rst ti me, rejecti on and payment ti mes will be reduced

• And, with more money in the bank, you will have the opportunity to take on more ti me-sensiti ve orders for your business.

Here’s what the global dairy company, Arla had to say:

OmPrompt helped us to start the journey to automati on and, ulti mately, to improve customer service experience, by streamlining their order process, and they are now working on other automati on steps within the order-to-cash process.


Your customers want you to be more organised. They want you to be more effi cient at collati ng and processing their orders and associated transacti ons in the fi rst place and turning them into the deliveries they need – when and where they want them.

They also want your invoices to be swift and accurate, so they don’t have to spend their ti me and man power amending, returning or disputi ng them.

Automati on can help you do this by putti ng you in total control of your enterprise resource planning (ERP) system – and giving your clients every reason to pay you on ti me – every ti me.

The secret, therefore, is understanding that the more eff ecti ve and effi cient you are in managing your end-to-end order-to-cash process, the more eff ecti ve and effi cient your clients will be at paying them – on ti me.

The Secret is out!


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OmPrompt Ltd67 Innovation DriveMilton Park, AbingdonOxfordshire, OX14 4RQUnited Kingdom

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As the pioneer of customer automation management, OmPrompt helps a growing number of the world’s leading brands eliminate gaps in the order-to-cash process that have tradition ally required manual workarounds.

OmPrompt has innovative ways of automating repeti tive manual work in the customer management cycle, enabling clients to free up resources, manage by exception, remove restric tions, and eliminate risks to their businesses.

Our intelligent, cloud-based solutions are delivered as a service, co-exist with EDI-based solutions, are quick to deploy, easy to extend, and offer an exceptionally fast ROI.

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Economy & Finance

The Secret to Helping Your Customers Pay on Time