Simplifying 3-Way Payment Matching And Saving On 62% Outsourcing Costs With Cash Application Automation

Challenges

A Merger Between Two Leading Staffing Firms, EmployBridge And Select Staffing, Led To Siloed Operational Units

Building a corporate synergy led to a broader product portfolio, consumer base, as well as global reach for EmployBridge. While EmployBridge made an effort to imbibe the transition, operational gaps and inconsistencies across multiple, disparate business units emerged as a significant challenge. Also, managing all the transactional activities through a set of two distinct ERPs was extremely difficult for them.

Excel-Based, Three-Way Matching For ~27,000 Payments Per Month Called For Arduous Manual Work

Like any other Staffing firm, the cash application procedure at EmployBridge requires all the payments received to undergo a three-way match under close scrutiny. They had all their transaction-related data stockpiled in the Vendor Management System (VMS).On receiving the payment files from the bank, analysts had to go ahead and manually retrieve all their respective remittance data from the VMS and map them. The corresponding open invoice had to be then sought out manually from across the ERP. However, the payment and remittance data, often incompatible with the ERP format, claimed further formatting by the analysts.

Outsourced Services And Lockbox Expenses Incurred High Opex At EmployBridge

The cash application team at EmployBridge was a blend of in-house and overseas teams. They had to manually apply cash for all the payments received from 15 Banks. So, EmployBridge procured the bank lockbox keying-in services as an attempt to ease the manual workload on the team. However, the heavy investment failed to yield results as the team nonetheless devoted a significant part of their work hours manually keying-in the missing remittance data and updating the lockbox payment file format.