Church & Dwight Automates 95% Cash Application for 400,000+ Invoices Annually to Dedicate More Time to Review & Resolve Deductions

Challenges

• Analysts Manually Linking E-Payments & Decoupled Remittances while Applying Cash

Being a leading consumer goods company, Church & Dwight used to apply cash for more than 400,000 invoices annually. 90% of the payments that they received were electronic payments, and the remittance for these electronic payments came in through emails, EDIs, web portals. This is how Church & Dwight’s cash application team applied cash every day:

• The cash application analyst had to manually capture remittances from various sources such as emails, check- stubs, EDIs for K-Mart and web portals for Walmart and Meijer. For instance, every day, the cash application analyst had to spend 4-5 hours reviewing just the EDI 820 remittances.
• Thereafter, the analyst used to manually match the extracted remittances with the payment file from the bank.
• Finally, the analyst had to match the payments with the open invoice in the ERP to apply cash.

• Negative Impact on Analyst’s Productivity due to Manual Deduction Coding for Huge Volume of Deductions

At Church & Dwight, 15 full-time employees had to manually handle 150,000 deductions per year. They had to manually map the customer reason codes to ERP-specific reason codes which were not only counterproductive for them but left them with no scope to work on deduction resolution. As a result, often deductions were written off while being unresolved, leading to a higher bad debt.