How to Avoid Missing Critical O2C Tasks

What are the tasks that get missed or done poorly? It’s often the mundane ones.

For your order-to-cash (O2C) process, it means tasks like sending payment reminders, compiling customer notes, worklist prioritization, and matching payments with remittances.

But these mundane tasks are the cornerstones of a strong cash flow. Any mistakes here can negatively impact your working capital and day-to-day operations.

Hence, the best way to eliminate human errors in O2C tasks is by automating them. It also frees up your analysts for more strategic initiatives such as business expansion.

In this article, we look at how automation can act as an additional member of your finance team to ensure error-free entries and streamlined accounts receivable (AR) management processes, all of which helps grow your business.

Order-to-cash tasks and tools to automate them

In this section, we list key order-to-cash tasks that are repetitive , yet critical, and can be completed successfully with automation.

1. Worklist prioritization
   Prioritizing worklists for collections is critical to lowering bad debt and reducing the number of aging accounts. Manually prioritizing worklists requires analysts to go through hundreds of customer accounts and invoices and sort them based on their credit score and amount due.
   Many times, collectors rely on their gut feeling to choose which customers to contact. Collecting and sorting invoice and credit risk data is time-consuming, not to mention the element of error involved in gut-based decisions.
   

   

   
   
2. Dunning
   Manual dunning methods often result in analysts missing out on sending reminders and reaching out to the wrong contacts since they have to deal with several customers and invoices.
   
   
3. Dispute management
   Customers may raise disputes on the billed amount, quality of goods, double billing, or incorrect invoice details. In case you miss acknowledging and resolving the disputes, customers will delay their payment, leading to a higher chance of bad debt. Speedy dispute resolutions, on the other hand, help lower DSO and improve customer experience.
   
   
4. Notes & reports
   Tracking customer payment commitments, updating customer records, capturing call notes, and preparing AR reports are repetitive, monotonous tasks. It is common for analysts to park these tasks for later, and they usually end up missing or hastily doing them.
   
   
5. Cash application/reconciliation
   Accurate cash application is critical to clear cash visibility and faster invoice/book closing. Manual cash application is time-consuming and prone to errors. Invoice and remittance mismatches lead to poor customer experience, inaccurate bookkeeping, and wrong cash projections.
   
   

Automation is the key to O2C success

In this article, we discussed a few everyday O2C tasks that can be automated to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance productivity. 

HighRadius is a leader in the invoice-to-cash automation space and helps 700+ companies reduce their DSO, improve team productivity, and gain competitive advantage.

Our O2C experts are available for a 30-minute free consultation if you’d like to evaluate your AR operations and identify automation opportunities with the highest ROI. Book your time now.