Top 3 Challenges that Controllers Face and How Automation Helps

Introduction

Controllers Are Not Just Controlling, but Also Reshaping Businesses Earlier, controllers mainly focused on financial statements. But now, CFOs and CEOs rely on them to provide data and analysis to guide their decision-making process. A deeper dive into the role of a controller will reveal that they have a hand in reshaping the vision of a company’s future. In mid-sized businesses, the role of a controller also includes being the lead accountant. As a result, controllers need to be financial advisors and streamline various processes to eliminate unnecessary costs and manual efforts. But, the complexities of daily operations pose a risk of inaccurate data capture. Accounts receivable is one of those areas that lack standardized processes and policies. With few employees dedicated to AR processes, mid-sized businesses struggle with timely collections. With manual tracking of invoices and payment due dates, employees either fail to identify critical accounts or spend hours gathering data before following up with one. However, as a controller, you need to leverage your strengths and identify improvement areas to add value and provide strategic insights as your company grows.

As the Controller of A Mid-sized Company, You Need To Know This!

Controllers are no longer only historians of a company. Being a controller, you need to have a deep understanding of regular financial data and analyze them effectively to provide insights as and when required.

As a controller, you could be inundated with massive amounts of data and find it difficult to draw insights because of manual errors and inefficient processes. If that is the case, you need to identify improvement areas and optimize them.

At HighRadius, we interact with controllers in the mid-market segment about their AR-related challenges. From our discussions with over 50+ controllers, we can summarize the financial controller challenges within 3 segments.

What are the top three financial controller challenges?

• Lack of policies 
• Lack of standardized processes 
• Manual errors

Is your credit scoring and customer onboarding process manual?

As a controller, if you still depend on manual credit applications to capture customer information, then probably you are spending on average two hours every day processing each credit application.

On top of that, if you are manually scoring your customers based on their bank and trade references, you might end up onboarding high-risk customers due to inaccurate scoring and approval of credit limit. Most mid-sized controllers do not run periodic credit reviews for their customers and only run a check if the customer is inactive for a long time.

The absence of a credit scoring model along with manual handling of credit information for evaluating credit terms could potentially harm your business. As a controller, it becomes imperative to address these issues and find a scalable solution to help the credit team minimize such risks.

Do you struggle to manage invoices and get paid on time?

AR teams may find managing too many invoices and chasing clients to get paid is . As a controller, if you rely on paper-based invoices, you are probably spending up to $15 per invoice.

And, this is just the direct cost of sending invoices. Indirect costs such as paying an employee to input relevant data into the invoice and hidden costs such as the cost to ship and store the invoice can become a financial burden, costing you up to $50 per invoice.

Apart from that, manually managing too many invoices can lead to missed entries and inaccurate data recording making it difficult for you to track them. Without proper visibility into invoices, the collections team struggles to identify the aging of invoices, and in worst-case scenarios, ends up missing out on payments from high-risk customers.

As a controller, you need to find ways to maintain financial records and invoices efficiently to manage payments and critical clients without any hassle.

Are you spending hours on your cash reconciliation process?

B2B payments are not simple. Businesses might pay for a single invoice or might decide to pay for multiple invoices. Some invoices may be eligible for discounts, while others may not. But, how to figure out for which invoice the incoming payment had been made?

As a controller, you not only need to know who paid but also need to record and maintain invoice-level details. The reconciliation process heavily depends on knowing who has paid and for what?

Also, if you still depend on legacy processes and systems for cash reconciliation, you will spend a lot of time matching the invoices with the corresponding payment details. Moreover, the process becomes time-consuming and complicated when you have instances of missing invoices or customer details.

As the head accountant, you must look for easier ways to capture invoice and payment data accurately. Doing so will help optimize the cash reconciliation process and minimize the time required to identify errors in real time.

Is Automation the Answer To All Your Problems?

Automation can be the answer to not only the people who work directly with the software but other stakeholders too. Leveraging automation has benefits all across the organization, from top C-suite executives to managers and staff.

As a controller, you need to have holistic visibility into the data your company produces and stores. You need to know what is happening in your company and how it is happening.

HighRadius’ RadiusOne AR Suite for mid-sized businesses automates and streamlines your accounts receivable process to eliminate repetitive manual tasks and provide instant access to real-time data to make the right business decisions. Here are some of the key benefits you can expect from the RadiusOne AR suite, as a controller:

Streamline credit management to onboard customer faster

RadiusOne Credit Risk Solution comes with an in-built credit application template to easily capture and manage customer credit information and fast-track the customer onboarding process. The solution automates credit scoring based on pre-loaded models and algorithms according to industry best practices. Moreover, it also runs periodic reviews on your customer’s credit data to update you on their creditworthiness.

The solution also provides access to centralized credit data and end-to-end visibility into different operations. You can also get access to out-of-the-box reports that will help you track team productivity and key credit metrics, including credit utilization, bad debt, and customer onboarding time.

Improve Invoice Management to receive payments faster

With RadiusOne e-Invoicing and Collections Solution, you can easily automate the delivery of invoices through emails and reflect the same in your ERP. Moreover, you no longer have to deal with invoice disputes and payment issues manually.

The solution offers a self-service portal for customers to view and manage their invoices and account statements. Customers can create disputes and make payments in multiple formats such as ACH and Credit cards via this portal. This feature provides the real-time status of an invoice and helps you save substantially on the cost of processing and managing invoices.

Automate the cash reconciliation process to identify and resolve disputes faster

RadiusOne Cash Reconciliation Solution automates customer identification and invoice matching. With automated remittance capture from various sources, such as email, web, and check stubs, you can match the remittance information matched with the corresponding payments and invoices without any errors.

Fast-track dispute resolution and payment recovery by identifying deductions due to short payments or over-payments with ease.

What Are the Next Steps?

As the controller of a mid-sized company, here are a few things you can do to help your company optimize AR processes:

• Make a consolidated list of the challenges you are facing with your AR team
• Discuss the challenges with your team and higher management
• Make a list of features necessary for process standardization
• Evaluate various solutions that can provide the features
• Invest and measure ROI for long-term growth

At HighRadius, we have been helping our mid-market customers in this regard. Want to learn more? Reach out to us and get a demo now!

FAQs

What is the biggest challenge as a financial controller?

The biggest challenge as a financial controller is to ensure accurate financial reporting, manage financial risks, and implement effective financial controls. 

This requires keeping up-to-date with changing accounting standards and regulations, analyzing complex financial data, and communicating financial information to stakeholders effectively.

What are the top goals of a financial controller?

The top goals of a financial controller typically include ensuring accurate and timely financial reporting, managing cash flow effectively, identifying and mitigating financial risks, optimizing financial performance, complying with legal and regulatory requirements, and providing strategic financial guidance to senior management.