This blog is a recap summary of our webinar Improve Your Collections Process with BAASS Sage Collect. The purpose of this blog is to share with you the challenges that our team faced, and how we developed a tool to improve and enhance our collection process. We will be providing our experience and results as well as reasons why the BAASS Sage Collect Tool may be beneficial for your team as well.
Did you know?
For many self-employed and small businesses that struggle with cash flow, the problem isn’t that they don’t have funds in the pipeline - it’s that they don’t have the funds when they need them for real-time expenses.
Collection Challenges
- Lengthy process that requires a lot of time and can result in human error
- Searching for the unpaid invoices in Sage 300
- Forgetting invoices or not sending all open invoices to the customer
- Not sending it to the appropriate AR contact
- No communication tracking
- No notifications on unpaid invoices
- Inability to track invoice Status Pipeline
Our team faced the same challenges others do – the accounts receivable collections process was taking upwards of 30-45 minutes per client, and in order to complete the process for one client it would take over 10 steps. As we know, when customers aren’t receiving invoices on time, our businesses will not be paid. On average it would take our AR up to 5 business days to complete 60 client requests, with up to 2 resources.
Why we built BAASS Sage Collect
Automate Manual Processes
We built this tool to help automate the tedious process of AR Collections. As mentioned it would take our AR Team up to 5 days to process 60 Client's overdue invoices. This would delay us substantially and could have a ripple effect into other areas of a project – it was imperative streamlined this.
Minimize Human Error
We built this tool to help reduce any headaches from human entry error. We are all human and mistakes happen. However, when it comes to AR collections we are, just like you - cannot afford mistakes. When processing several invoices and statements we need to ensure we are collating the correct data for the right people.
Optimize efficiency + Collaboration
We built this tool in Sage CRM to optimize efficiency and enable company wide collaboration. In order to ensure we have one central source of truth for client information, it made the most sense for us to build this tool in Sage CRM. This was so all departments (sales, marketing, accounting, operation, support and management) are able to see varying information related to companies. It would also keep all the information in one secure place and not in an inbox thread.
Outcome
Although our AR team was doubtful of automating this process and hesitant to change overall. When talking to our AR team about the outcome of implementing BAASS Sage Collect Tool – hands down they said it was incredible.
Now with the collection tool, on average when processing 60 client requests it will take around 2 hours, opposed to 5 business days. We were able to reduce the number of steps taken to send statements with copies of unpaid invoices to clients, and gained the ability to track and send all statements and invoices with one click. All of these benefits have led us to reduce our total fulfillment time by 95%. The tool is also fully integrated with our Sage CRM which gives Sales, Operations and Management visibility into what is happening with clients invoices in real-time.
