Exploring the role of Technology in Credit & AR

In today’s dynamic world, CFOs are looking to drive strategic value and insights to support improved decision making. While embarking on a journey to deliver value, CFOs are also navigating cost pressures and capacity constraints to drive strategic initiatives while strengthening their controls environment – in short, stakeholders are demanding that the CFO delivers more, with less.

Achieving these goals requires a strategic shift in focus, in which Finance must spend significantly less time on low-value transactional activity, to fund investments that will improve organizational decision making. While opportunities to drive efficiency exist across Finance, the invoice to cash (I2C) process is often a logical starting point given high dependencies on manual processes and the impact on cashflow, working capital, profitability and customer experience.

Technology of course has a role to play but with so much hype it can lead to scepticism at best and ignorance at worst. And if you consider that I2C usually has the lowest level of adoption of automation of all the finance functions, it provides both the opportunity and challenges.

Automation is to time what interest is to money.

A frequently asked question is, “Are you busy?”

I am sure most of us are competent in making a to-do list, prioritising and organising accordingly but this does not create more time.

How many of us make things easier for ourselves in our personal lives by paying for services by direct debit to ensure it gets done automatically and saving our time?

In a world where most of us are being asked to do more we should investigate how we can spend our time, and the expertise of our people, to achieve optimal results. If you are achieving good results today that’s brilliant, but what could you achieve if you and your team had more time?

So, what should we consider when exploring the role of technology and automation. Here are some suggestions for consideration.

What is the problem I am solving?

Some organistions have bought Gen AI and then looked at how to use it in their organisation. I would suggest that not all process challenges need Gen AI.

One of the biggest downfalls for automation projects is when we try to automate what we do today. We should be considering how automation can transform how we work. Automation provides new ways of working.

Consider a SatNav in a car – not only does it provide you with the route, as a road atlas could, but, using all the possible information available at that specific time, it provides you with the best possible route to arrive at your destination. Sometimes this can be on roads that you never knew existed before!

It is therefore critical to spend time on understanding the problem you are looking to solve, whilst being open to explore new methods to solve it.

Role of the Vendor

Purchasing a third party solution for the first time, can be rather daunting for finance leaders. This is where your vendor should be partnering with you to provide you with a number of supporting processes such as:

• Understanding your goals and challenges and demonstrating how they would use automation to increase productivity, impact results and improve the experience for you, your team and your customers.
• Providing a reference call with an organization who faced similar challenges. This provides comfort on the solution and an opportunity to learn from their experience, thus avoiding making the same mistakes in the project.
• Note: if vendors do not provide references ask yourself why?
• Providing guidance on preparation of the business case for you – obtaining budget and senior leadership buy-in is critical for success. I know from my own experience this was the hardest step of the process in purchasing automation. Leaning in on people who have experience to document the benefits both tangible and non-tangible could be the key element to your project gaining approval.

It can sound like a marketing slogan, but look for a vendor who partners with customers and not just supplies a solution. This shows you will get the right support all the way through the customer journey.

One pitfall to avoid when looking at vendors is to investigate what reports are available and the impact they make. Do not be fooled by the number of reports or fancy marketing around the use of AI or Gen AI – test them and find out how they will make a difference to you, your team and your organization.

I would suggest your objective should be to obtain reporting capabilities you do not currently have and gain the ability to automate some of the reporting you perform manually today.

Decision Intelligence

The role of automation is not solely for tasks but also to obtain and use data. The common challenge for organizations of all sizes is not the lack of data, but the time taken to get information into the hands of users to improve the decisions they take every day. I think it is fair to say we make 100’s of decisions every day that could be improved if we had all the data possible for consideration.

The role of data can be lost by the sense of familiarity. Step back for a moment and consider:

• Data-driven decisions - What data is easily available for users at all levels to assist in the decision-making process.

• Decisions to drive actions - Is the data driving real time changes in the actions that are performed?

• Actions drive Results – Being able to monitor performance of your team and customer behaviours for I2C teams, allows prioritization of work to ensure the critical actions are being performed on a daily basis and can be easily monitored.

Being able to combine the productivity of your team on the actions that drives results is how you and your team go from good to great.

Summary – What are you waiting for?

As the old saying goes, change is inevitable. Don’t wait for change to come from above or from other finance leaders. Explore what technology is available and investigate how the role of automation can impact you to:

• Create more time by finding new answers to old questions.

• Maximise time on actions that drive outcomes.

• Shorten the time from information to intelligence.

The role of automation can be a game changer – investigate, deep-dive and transform!

With special thanks to Brian Morgan, Senior Director, Strategy & GTM at Blackline for writing this special feature for us.