Supercharge your Cash Collection
How AI can boost your cash performance
In this whitepaper, we examine some of the challenges CFOs face in their journey to digitize and accelerate their finance departments. We explore how those challenges can be overcome using new technology solutions driven by artificial intelligence (AI), yielding improved cash performance and optimising working capital.
Today the order-to-cash (O2C) process for many organizations is still highly manual and often runs inefficiently. CFOs and IT leaders have made significant investments in ERP systems in recent years in an attempt to address this problem. However, while this has filled some of the gaps, the limitations of ERPs mean this even the most advanced can’t provide organizations with the capabilities needed to truly transform the cash collection process in today’s market.
The use of AI technology in Order-to-Cash software systems is delivering considerable benefits. Predictive analytics help in assessing credit terms or deciding the best actions to take to get payment from a customer. AI can also help process automation by taking over the running of key activities, streamlining cash collection and dispute management, for example.
The Need for Smarter Cash Collection
The COVID-19 pandemic is a harsh example of just how quickly companies sometimes need to react and adapt to unforeseen disruptions. One impact of the pandemic is that many companies had to rapidly free up cash just to survive the initial phase of the crisis. And in the medium-to-longer term, this need to improve cash flow and working capital will likely continue as global economies experience major downturns and recession. That means cash collection will be more important than ever before.
In order to improve working capital, CFOs will need to exploit the capabilities of new technologies that can drive improvements in processes and efficiency, and once in place they must learn to leverage their data for continued analysis and optimization. Bolstering this need for innovation, the majority of CFOs and senior finance executives acknowledge that more innovation is needed in finance. However, most companies are still struggling to get a handle on cash flow.
We discuss:
- AI in the order-to-cash process
- The need for smarter cash collection systems
- How AI can transform collections
- Augmenting the collection process with payment intelligence