Leverage automation to sky-rocket your Cash Posting rate up to 95% and beyond

Top secrets @ American Greetings

American Greetings is a creator and manufacturer of innovative social expression products such as paper cards and digital greetings.

Companies that approach the process of cash posting with strategic goals in mind, gain considerable advantages over those that do not. Today’s businesses receive payments from a variety of sources i.e, e-payments & checks. Posting of all of those payments along with their matched remittances can be challenging for companies dealing with multiple business units and large customer bases, especially if you don’t have enough resources to staff a large team including accounting professionals.

Cash application is the process of applying those different forms of payment to the appropriate invoices, which can be a laborious, time- consuming process that is prone to errors. This process becomes even more complex and grueling when the remittances associated with payments are separated and are received from different customer bases at different intervals of time. All these painstaking tasks in cash application can be eliminated with 95% + straight-through cash posting.

If automation has not been brought into the cash application process yet, there’s an opportunity to increase efficiency and accuracy with minimal manual intervention. In addition to that, one could receive a maximum straight-through cash posting within the organization while providing a better customer experience.

Key challenges in handling different customer bases

American Greetings had to deal with multiple bases:

Consignment Customers: Customers that store products and consume them when needed are consignment customers. Thus, we can say that consignment customers are self-invoicing. If remittance information is late or missing then the invoicing is impacted, which then impacts cash application. This creates residuals for unidentified items or leaving transactions unresolved. In that case, the customer’s master data is used to drive the remittance amount where their pricing determines the amount paid. Any variances noted are the responsibility of American Greetings to identify and reconcile.

Big Box Retailers: The few names that come to mind here are Walmart, Home Depot. They sell a variety of products and occupy a huge physical space. A large majority of Big Box retailers send EDI as a result of remittance information whether it will be provided or not is guaranteed, lots of non-standard remittance format comes in. Due to the immense volume of remittances and a large number of transactions results in a high number of unidentified transactions. Because remittance formats vary from custom.

Mom & Pop Store: These are small retail stores and more likely constitute online bill payers, credit card payers, and heavy check payers. The frequent occurrence of missing remittance details and non- standardized format for remittances lead to the high use of AI to drive efficiencies in the cash application process as the target being the EIPP audience.

“American Greetings’ Cash Posting rate were not because of all these above-stated issues which they encountered while dealing with different customer bases.”

Business Impact of these Challenges

• Aging: The longer it takes to clear payment, the longer the AR items remain open.

• Negative impact on downstream processes: The Rebate processing, credit decisions were negatively impacted by cash application inefficiencies.

• Inefficient resource utilization: The cash application procedures are required to improve efficiency, which allows one to shift their employees to tasks that might help in winning more customers and increase the business’s annual income. cash application resources could be utilized in other areas within the department.

“Artificial Intelligence can help you automate these tasks and deploys them into a single workflow process.”

Cash Application Cloud “learns” the more it works. On being exposed to more remittances and payments, the cash application cloud improves its predictive performance, resulting in higher auto-match and higher accuracy rates.

Boost revenue while delighting customers

Companies wish to increase revenues quickly when customers increase their respective order volume – but to do so, the cash application process needs to respond with agility. Companies need a solution that can:

• Conduct quick thinking.
• Eliminate the process of jumping between multiple systems because each click or screen change is a loss of efficiency.
• Enable auto-matching of payments and remittances in the absence or delay of remittance details.
• Provide 360-degree visibility to analyze performance swings in the Cash Application process.

An easily deployable and flexible solution

Supervised Artificial Intelligence allows companies to automate more than 95% of the manual, repetitive tasks so that one can focus on the few exceptions that need human analysis. It helps the entire team to become more efficient and focus on other strategic processes such as credit, collections, deductions. As the speed of the cash posting rate increases, closed A/R is sent back into the ERP system successfully.

This cloud-based solution offers best-in-class usability, is ERP agnostic, takes little time to deploy.

Key features include:

• Automated Cash Application enabled by AI
• Auto-aggregation of information from multiple sources
• Efficiency in handling all forms of remittances such as EDIs, checks, email attachments, and web portal files
• Accurate cash posting with minimal human intervention

Results Achieved

“The days of manual ledger entries, double-entry books, shoe-boxes, and color-coded folders are behind us.” -Laura Edwards

Chief focus on precision and accuracy

Apart from being faster than manual processing, HighRadius’ cash application cloud is also more accurate. The credit goes to the effortless task of automation that can scan emails, invoices and remittance statements in all the formats and establish more precise matching. As it efficiently decodes remittance providing patterns and their mode of providing the remittance, it aids in faster and accurate cash posting.

The Smart Solution

Highradius changed the American Greetings’ cash application process by enabling 95% straight-through cash posting.

“Utilization Of A/R Resources Results In Bringing Efficiency And Accuracy In All The Downstream Processes As Well- Collections, Credit Deductions As Well.” -Lauren Kennedy