23 KPIs for Shared Services: From Process Manager to Strategic Leader

Strategic Metric

Definition
This metric measures the overall process cost in the entire order-to-cash cycle i.e. from generating to delivering customer invoices.

Why measure it?

Direct impact on the bottom-line and every business could reduce it by:

• Improving productivity across order-to-cash
• Collecting on time
• Reducing deductions through discipline in upstream processes
• Reducing write-offs and tolerances

Strategic Metric

Definition
Unbilled receivables, also called “accrued receivables”, are products and services delivered, yet for which invoices have not been generated

Why measure it?

When dealing with project-based businesses unbilled revenue has a key role in working capital management. Keeping close tabs on the contracts that govern accrued receivables makes sure that the invoice is sent on time and the revenue is realized fast

Strategic Metric

Definition
The value of receivables outstanding or waiting to be collected from customers, expressed in the equivalent number of days of revenue.

Why measure it?

This metric is an accurate indicator of the performance of the accounts receivable department.

Lower DSO indicates a company has a very strict credit policy, which may be hampering the sales. Higher DSO is an indication of an inefficient analysis of the applicants for open accounts.

A healthy DSO is no more than 5-10 days longer than weighted average payment terms. Benchmarking the DSO against companies in the same industry is another way to arrive at a healthy DSO number.

Strategic Metric

Definition
This report lists the top 5 most frequently occurring disputes.

Why measure it?

The dispute team could refer to this report and take corrective action by drilling down on the source of the dispute and prevent them from happening in the future. Some examples include creating sales orders with the wrong pricing details or finding that a certain carrier delivers more damaged goods.

Strategic Metric

Definition
This metric keeps track of the bad debts that are a result of uncollectible.

Why measure it?

While maintaining a healthy bad-debt reserve is a best-practice keeping close tabs on the bad-debt write-offs figure is important because the company has to sell many more orders(depending on the gross margin) in order to make up for the loss in uncollected revenue.

Strategic Metric

Definition
It is the disputed value of the dispute case that the customer has specified.

Why measure it?

This metric is useful in that it gives a number on the value of deductions that an organization is processing. This metric in conjunction with the next one which is as a % of A/R will be useful especially to estimate revenue leakages that are happening and also understanding figures for the cost of doing business in terms of allowances for deductions.

Strategic Metric

Definition
This metric is to evaluate the dollar value of all disputes that are raised as the percentage of total AR.

Why measure it?

This metric as a % of total A/R or as a % total sales is a good one to benchmark within the same industry to identify process gaps and failures.

Strategic Metric

Definition
It is the percentage of new applications that your credit analysts process or the percentage of new customers that they have onboarded.

Why measure it?

Performance of an credit analyst is evaluated based on the number of applications they process.

Individual Performance Metric – Process Health Metric

Definition
Since most cash application processes have some form of automation, the analyst productivity is measured on the number of exceptions they process.

Why measure it?

This metric lets you know the rate at which your exceptions are being handled for managing your analysts more efficiently. In addition, it will also allow you to optimize the cash application process to evaluate the most frequently occurring exceptions and remedy the situation.

Individual Performance Metric

Definition
It measures the average number of invoices received and processed per full-time equivalent (FTE) in the accounts receivable department

Why measure it?

Some analysts have multiple job roles across credit, collections, billing. So it is essential to have individual metrics for different processes performed by the analysts. Invoice issued per FTE is a measure of the productivity of an employee in billing the invoices.

Individual Performance Metric

Definition
It is the number of disputes resolved with respect to the total disputes raised.

Why measure it?

Deductions backlog is a big issue especially in the consumer goods industry and looking at the number of deductions resolved per analyst will allow GPOs to compare the efficiency of the analysts

Process health Metric

Definition
This metric is to keep track of the time required to resolve collection disputes.

Why measure it?

This metric gives a good idea of the average time required to identify and resolve a deduction, and information about the longest-running deduction cases of different customers.

Process Health Metric

Definition
This metric is a ratio of A/R invoices with a certain past-due limit to the overall past-due invoices.

Why measure it?

Conventional collections wisdom states that the longer one takes to collect, the greater the chances of it turning to bad-debt. This metric helps in identifying invoices across varied aging periods. For example, to have a clear picture of the invoices with past-due more than 45-day term, we sum up the number of invoices from aging buckets above 45-day term and find its percentage from the total invoices.

Process Health Metric

Definition
This is a comparative relation between different strategies and the credit limits assigned to them. For example in the event where:
Credit Exposure for a new customer having public financials in January is $8 M and for clients without financials is $6 M while in Dec they were $6 M and $7 M respectively. This shows that the company is taking more risk in January.

Why measure it?

Credit managers use different strategies for evaluating credit exposure based on customer profiles. Keeping close tabs on the credit exposure will help GPOs in estimating the bad-debt reserve better and prevent fluctuating bad-debt levels.

Process Health Metric

Definition
This metric measures the efficiency of cash application process within 24 hrs. of payment received.

Why measure it?

As the accounting phrase goes, “Put in the Books!”. A company needs to have all its money in the books for the treasury teams to understand working capital available on hand. Failure to apply cash the same day will affect downstream processes such as collections where there is a risk that collections analysts will contact customers who had already paid.

Process Health Metric

Definition
It expresses the average number of days the invoices get paid after the due date.

Why measure it?

If DSO is an overall performance indicator of the accounts receivable department, then ADD is more specific to the collection team and could be used to design collections strategies tailored to customer payment behaviors.

Process Health Metric

Definition
It is the monetary value of invoices received on or before the stipulated payment terms.

Why measure it?

A time series of this measure will help you evaluate 1) effectiveness of the collections and the pre-payment discounts strategy and 2) payment behavior of customers. An upward trend is very good news for the working capital of the company.

Process health Metric

Definition
Invoicing being a labor-intensive work involving data entry, paper-work, revisions, approvals, and bookkeeping, there is a need to drive efficiency by monitoring the time taken by analysts to generate invoices.

Why measure it?

The faster an invoice is delivered to the customer, the better the chances of getting paid early. Not all customers are looking to delay payments, as long as the invoice reaches them within their payment cycles, there is a good chance that they pay. Reducing the time taken to generate the invoice is critical for collections teams as it enables proactive collections.

Process Health Metric

Definition
Invoice Error Rate measures the percentage of invoices with an error to the total invoices created by the billing and invoicing team.

Why measure it?

Invoice errors cause confusion between suppliers and buyers and lowers supplier credibility. The chain of paperwork for communicating the mistake in an invoice sent by you to the customer causes inconvenience at both ends. A large number of non-trade deductions could be attributed to invoice errors and eliminating these could prevent in faster collections.

Process Health Metric

Definition
Total number of credit reviews performed and the time taken per review

Why measure it?

This will allow in estimating the volume of work for the credit team for planning periodic credit reviews and blocked order reviews

Process Health Metric

Definition
This metric is a measure of the dollar amount collected on the disputes raised for invalid deductions.

Why measure it?

This metric could be used to highlight two things
1) customer behavior and the likelihood of disputing invoices
2) efficiency and effectiveness of the deductions team in researching and finding invalid deductions

Process Health Metric

Definition
This metric is the amount that was collected in a given time period to the amount of receivables that were available for collection in that time period

Why measure it?

This metric is a proxy for measuring the effectiveness of the collections department. The closer this number is to 100%, the better it is for the collections team.

Process Health Metric

Definition
It is the ratio of unapplied cash to the total payments received during a certain time period.

Why measure it?

This metric helps you in determining the effectiveness of the cash application automation in place and also the analysts for resolving the exceptions.