The collection process is no mean feat. Growth in businesses, through organic and inorganic expansion, has only meant more demand leading to more transactions and a rise in the number of customers ensuring chaos in accounts receivables. The collections challenge is clearly not going away. A great deal of insight into the future of collections management could be gained by looking at how the collection process has matured over the years based on the key success factors.
Companies that are ad-hoc in their collection management practices are highly dependent on people in terms of skill, experience, and expertise in their day-to-day collections operations. They are in the infancy stages of putting processes and technology in place, to better manage and take control of accounts receivable.
The process overview is given below:
The following explores how the ad-hoc process defines the 5 key success factors:
In this process, some ground-level standardization is adopted into the system. It focuses on the process itself. This helps the collectors to design and define the process flow
This process is the root level standardized and in the absence of a system, organizations depend on individuals to implement credit and collection policies.
The process overview is given below:
The following explores how the reactive process defines the 5 key success factors:
A preventive process starts focusing on data to drive decision-making in the collections process. This includes generating prioritized worklists for the collectors. This process also leverages information from other credit to cash processes and includes that information to drive collector activity. It also uses technology for automating clerical tasks such as dunning correspondence.
The following defines the process:
The following explores how the preventive process defines the 5 key success factors:
Companies who find themselves managing collections at the proactive level leverage people, processes, and technology for their business operations and are knocking all of them out of the park! They have optimized collections operations and are doing everything right, or at least have a plan in place to do so.
Proactive Process focuses on leveraging people, and process automation through technology and data, for decision making and easy collaboration with other credit-to-cash teams.
The process overview is given below:
The following explores how the proactive process defines the 5 key success factors:
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