Prevent Deductions from Eroding Your Bottomline

Transcript

Jessica Butler:

Welcome, everyone. You know young kids should go to medical school. But my husband and I did not marry young. He’s the same age as me. And that’s a little weird. My son was very fortunate. He’s at medical school in the United States. My husband is not. My husband could not get in the United States so he’s offshore but he’s (my son) finishing up in April with the classes. And it’s kind of amazing. It makes me feel like what kind of drive and passion he must have to want to do this because it’s been like two and a half years of no fun.

Jessica Butler:

So that was my fun fact though. Kind of weird. OK. Yes, I am Jessica Butler and I do a lot of work with companies. All I love is deductions, love trying to figure out how to improve what you’re doing, how to manage it better. There certainly are some elements of deductions that are out of your control and there are certain times when I feel that retailers may take advantage. But there are lots of times when I feel that deductions are under the control of your organization and there are things that you’re doing where you’re shooting yourselves in the foot or not managing them properly so into all of that kind of stuff.

Jessica Butler:

This presentation is not talking about HighRadius very much at all. So if you need to leave you can leave. Although I love HighRadius and I talk a lot about HighRadius and work with my clients to help them when they’re putting in HighRadius how to make sure they have the best practices and processes. So what I’m going to do this morning though is talk in general about what few elements are that I think are really important when you’re managing deductions. What kind of a foundation, I think that you need it can be done in many systems, many ways. And then this afternoon if you want more detail. How many people use DMX or HighRadius as a deduction system? OK, a few. How many are thinking about it? OK. How many are in the wrong class? OK. So this afternoon what I’m going to do is I have another session. I don’t remember what it’s called but it’s something like optimizing your DNS implementation so HighRadius helped me with the presentation and they included a lot of advanced functionality things that have been released within the last year that they’re very excited about, which is great. But I’m going to spend part of today adding to what I think are really the critical elements that you must have in place in a DNS system. So. So often when I’ve gone to talk with clients after they’ve put in DNS let’s say I see that to me anyway I say basic key requirements according to me. Some basic things that I think in terms of filters, in terms of setups, in terms of action codes, I think often are not in place. And I believe that they’re really critical as a foundation to use the tool properly.

Jessica Butler:

So if you’re interested in that and even if you don’t have DNS but you’re looking at it will be kind of a good way to see some opportunities. I hope if I kind of get the division over the next few hours and do it. But what I’m going to do here is really talk about after telling you a little bit of an impact, really look at some improvements and some things that you can think about from creating a policy in your organization, to making sure you’re getting a jumpstart on deductions, being as proactive as possible, being able to track the deductions that are really important, had a dispute invalid deductions, collaborate and educate. You’ll see. We’ll talk about it. If anyone has any questions or concerns or thoughts or opinions as I’m talking. Please feel free to share them if you have a question. Something you don’t understand. Happy to hear it. So let’s go. So first of all if we look at the business impact of deductions right. If you are not managing deductions properly, there are lots of impacts on your business. First of all, it’s a poor customer experience. So there definitely are customers of yours who are not happy with deductions. Some of them like some kinds of deductions but they don’t like other types of deductions so if you’re that kind of problem vendor or supplier and they’re having a lot of issues that’s something that that’s an issue. That’s a problem they don’t like. It’s obvious that deductions have a direct impact on working capital. And it’s very very challenging and it also has a drain on resources your bottom line the whole thing. So a couple of interesting numbers according to again meet you.

Jessica Butler:

This is. The deduction survey. I don’t remember how many companies participated, maybe two or three hundred something like that but this is a deduction book. It’s benchmark information if you want a copy I have come up here, take them. And according to this, the average going up you can guess. What do you think the median recovery percent is on invalid deductions? So if you have a deduction and it’s invalid and you dispute it with your customer what do you think is the median that you recover? Percent. Don’t flip through and find it. Anybody? 50 percent; 30 percent; 20 percent; 40 percent. It’s 60 percent. I didn’t go on the audit of the people who responded right. So it’s 60 percent though. That’s a lot. But that gives 40 percent that people are not even people who are probably being optimistic about what they recover. So I think there’s really a big opportunity and maybe it should be more when it’s lower I start to think about are you not doing the research properly or are you not identifying them? Do you not have the right backup and supporting documents? So it’s interesting. Here’s what I think about trade and on trade. First of all the trade that’s invalid is much much much smaller than that. Trade that’s valid is typically a lot smaller than the non-trade that’s not valid but the dollars are often a lot. I usually see in terms of trade deductions maybe 1 percent that’s not valid. And with the non-trade depending on the industry it could be a lot more, could be 5, could be 10 percent, if you have a very high invalid deduction percentage you know. To me, that means it’s on you, a little bit if you’ve got a lot of high invalids it either means you are doing a lot of things wrong and maybe even with your paperwork or something. Why do you have all these false positives? On the other hand, if you’re invalid is really low I think you’re probably not doing a good job of research and your deductions to figure out what’s truly invalid or not.

Jessica Butler:

If you’re interested in seeing how you rank, how you stack up on my website, there is a thing called an Assessment and you put in five or six data elements and you’ll get a report; a one-page report based on these benchmarks. How you rate. Oh, you’re in the 20th fortieth percentile. Oh, you’re in this percentile. So if you’re interested in understanding how you’re doing, definitely do that. Well if you’re interested, also I’m here for you to come and see me afterward. I’m happy to spend half an hour with you and hear your situation and give you thoughts. I mean I really am a teacher at heart so I like to share knowledge and information. So this slide here says so if you’re a one-billion-dollar company and your overall deduction percent is 10 percent including trade and you have you know 10 percent invalid deductions; if you’re collecting 60 percent you’re still leaving for a million dollars on the table. That’s a lot of money to say what I can do. How do I do a better job of doing that? And again. So we already ask this what percent of invalid do you recover. So 60 percent that’s the median. Right. So you really want to make sure you’re doing a good job. So here are some things that I think that you can do. I mentioned these already so I’m not going to spend time on them. I’m going to go right into them. The first is: Have a policy. So in your organization, it’s really important to have a deduction policy that everybody understands. You want it to be aligned with your internal controls. You want to make sure that everybody agrees. What I often see is that people don’t have a policy. So deductions come in. People spend time researching them but meanwhile, they’re not invalid, they’re valid but you still spend time researching them or they’re invalid but you have a company policy where you’re just going to accept them anyway. So it’s really important to come up with if there are certain things you can make a business decision such as a certain deduction you know you’re going to allow. That’s fine but then communicate it with people who are going to see them so that you don’t have people sort of wasting their time chasing something that you’re not going to get.

Jessica Butler:

So for example, let’s say I get a lot of shortage deductions and let’s say I have the customer pick up as well and I say “Gee, I don’t want to allow any shortage deductions for customer pickup”. So do you have a customer pickup agreement? It does say that there are no shortages allowed. And if so is that communicated with the customer so you can set yourselves up so that you can do a better job at preventing things. On the other hand with customer pickup, people often say oh no we have a policy and then I say well do you allow truckers on your you know like on your whatever docks to count. So you say there can be no shortage but you don’t let them count. So now you have a problem. What are you going to do? It’s fine. Many companies are like that. But let’s come up with a decision. What are you going to do? Are you going to allow them or not and then communicate that and then have everybody agree. It’s just disheartening for me to see when I talk to the analysts and they say one thing: oh we know we’re not going to do this or we’re never gonna get paid for that. But still, they’re spending time on it. How can we kind of escalate that and just come up with an agreement that we all understand? And that helps people to understand how they’re going to deal with something or resolve it or handle it when it comes in so it’s a really smart thing to do. Also, have your own sort of terms and conditions. Everybody has terms and conditions but has something in an agreement where it talks about what we require. You know if you’re going to take a deduction here’s the documentation that we require to take that deduction.

Jessica Butler:

Here’s for returns, here’s our policy. It certainly doesn’t work 100 percent of the time. There are a lot of big retailers that they go to. That’s really nice. But they do their own thing. However for some smaller companies and even some of the retailers that you would hear of it’s a negotiating element and it’s something that can get done. And if you talk with your sales people when they discuss vendor agreements, it can often be discussed at the same time and it doesn’t have to be a very difficult thing. It can be a little bit of a negotiation. And I have a group of companies called my compliance advisory board and every quarter we look at a certain deduction issue and I think there are companies that do really good jobs of managing deductions. And we talk about an issue and then I kind of take their practices and write a white paper and probably a year or so ago did one on this. Like how good are you at having your own policies and communicating with your customer. And how does that work? And I was really surprised and impressed that there were a lot of things that people were doing that work. There were some good tips. If anybody wants a copy of that white paper gives me your email address. And if you gave it to me at the last session you have to do it again because I already sent that. But give me your email address and I’ll send you that white paper because even if there’s one tip that you get out of it one thing to think about. That’s great.

Jessica Butler:

To get a jumpstart, you want to be proactive. How many people here are willing to admit that their deduction process starts when the deduction is received. Everyone’s closing your eyes so that you don’t see what everybody else says right. Most people. It starts when the deduction, you’re already behind. It’s too late. So many of your customers are sending information in advance. And I definitely understand especially if you’re not happy, you don’t have an automated system pulling that back up if you’re doing it manually if you’re waiting for the deduction. But there is such a great opportunity now to get that information early and sometimes you can even dispute it and avoid it from being taken. If you are using a system like HighRadius and you’re using DNS even if you know if you’re starting you might not be able to do it initially but that should be your goal to work towards that or even for some of those pre deductions even if you can’t, in general, get certain claims that are over a certain dollar amount. You know to set up a filter for pre deductions that are not merged.

Jessica Butler:

So that means they haven’t found their deduction over a certain dollar amount and make people look at that quickly. See what it is. You know get a heads up. It doesn’t have to be everything. So you want to make sure that people are looking at that information. It’s important you want to know your customer behavior. Everybody sells to Amazon here. All right. So again have a policy. You know you’re going to get shortages from Amazon. So have your own policy. Right. I have some clients as I said yesterday, they wait. Some of them wait 60 days, I’m going to wait 60 days and let it come in and out and in and out and in and out and then by then, I’ll deal with what’s left. Others say nope I’m doing every single one. So again talk about the pros and cons of each policy. Know what you’re going to do. Right. It’s important and it’s important to be able to talk with your collectors as well so they know what’s happening. If you’re looking and getting a jump start on these pre deductions or these things before deductions come in, you want to make sure that you’re in communication with the collectors so that they know what issues are. And see if it’s going to have some overall impact on their credit line right. All of these types of things you want to be able to look at so that you’re not surprised and a lot of companies now, a lot of retailers they start their dispute window from when they post that information on their portal. Not based on the remittance but as soon as it’s available on their portal. So you need to know that it’s helpful. All right. Not for everyone. And again you don’t have to deal with every single customer in exactly the same way.

Jessica Butler:

There’s somewhere it may be helpful to kind of get that pre-deduction and send it to another department so that they are doing their research, they can get a jumpstart on the research. The next one is, track the status. There are so many companies that I go and talk with and I say, “Oh, let’s look at your deductions!” and they should give me a big list of open deductions to one amount. All right. “Can you show me sort of where it is in the life cycle” and they kind of look at me and I can get a report of every single line item and I can have notes but if I try to summarize it in other buckets it becomes very challenging. So it’s very hard as managers or management if you’re trying to understand where we are and where the problem is and where things may get bogged down if you don’t have a very good sort of status in DMX. I will use the action code. If you don’t have a really good way to put them in the right buckets of where they are in the life cycle, it’s very hard to manage it and you end up going to talk to people individually about where we are on this, that’s very time-consuming.

Jessica Butler:

You want to be careful. You don’t want to have too many buckets because then people it’s a waste of time. They pick the wrong one. They stopped doing it because there are so many if they’re manually selecting them, it takes too long. So there’s a balance between having too many and not having enough. But I really believe there’s some basic, you know, it’s brand new. I haven’t done anything with it. I mean now it’s in the research process. I’m waiting for proof of delivery. I’m waiting for another department to answer it’s invalid. I’m disputing it. I’ve already disputed it. So these buckets you can see there’s a difference between my opponent, my mind anyway. There’s a difference between open deductions that are invalid and I’ve disputed that open deductions no one’s looked at yet. How do you know? So you must have a way to know quickly and figure out which ones make sense for you and I think this afternoon I’m going to put it in my presentation some different statuses or action codes that I think are a good starting point. And you want to make sure our people are using them. You know if you have these different status codes and you run reports and you go talk to people and they say, “Oh no! Well, I didn’t update that you have to update it. You have to make sure that you’re using the information so that people keep it accurate. If you never ask anyone questions and people are going to stop using it, the next one dispute invalid deductions. Oh my goodness! if something is invalid you need to dispute it but you need to have the proper backup and documentation.

Jessica Butler:

I strongly recommend you don’t just dispute things for the sake of disputing things. You should have the right backup if you dispute things. Many of your customers anyway know the vendors who have the right and who really are. What do they call the vendors who can support their disputes and take them seriously and often get repaid and those who throw everything against the wall and they just don’t even spend the time looking at it? So you can really harm yourself by disputing things that really are not collectible or without the right information and you don’t want to do that. I don’t think you want to do that. You want to make sure that it’s really right and you’re getting the money back. OK. So we talked about the recovery experience. Fine. So what else. Collaborate and educate. So it’s amazing, it always astounds me. Not surprising but it gives me hope actually. Forty-one percent in the survey we asked what’s your biggest internal challenge to manage deductions. Forty-one percent of companies said it’s us working together. So it’s not surprising. Right. It’s kind of human nature and you know nobody really wants to talk to anybody else about a problem and mind their own business and who made them their boss and all that kind of stuff. It all happens. So you have to find a way to get everybody to see that I’m not criticizing you I’m not attacking you. This is a win-win for all of us. We’re going to work together. I want to help you. How can I do it and what I say is here’s what I don’t know if you could. This is what companies typically look like. So the blue circle and inside are you. There are little circles in there with all the different departments. And on the outside are your customers and you can see everyone’s banging into each other.

Jessica Butler:

I mean to talk in nobody’s knowing, it’s chaotic and it’s inefficient. Everybody feels bad you know, nobody wants to own it and then your customers also, it’s not all that efficient for your customers, when the reality is if you align with your organization. Right. Deductions are a company-wide issue. You can not resolve deductions by yourself. It also gets dumped in the finance area and fights. It’s like you have to clean up everybody else’s mess but you didn’t cause it. And then when you try to say something that really you know who you are telling me what to do. And so how can you do it, if you can’t get everybody to align together and see the benefit for everyone, then it’s gonna be very challenging. So the goal is to me anyway when I think about it from a finance perspective I think how can I try to have everybody understand that I can help you. I can provide you with the information you need. Maybe my group can do some research upfront. What can I do to make it easier for you to understand maybe what you’re doing and see that there’s really some corrective action that you can take? There’s no one right way by the way to manage deductions.

Jessica Butler:

There’s no one right way. Oh, there always has to be a group that reports up through finance. Oh, you need to have a deductions group and they report to Operations. It’s really dependent on your organization. There are some organizations that have very strong leadership let’s say in the operations area and they really see the value in improving their operations and improving the processes and they want to own certain pieces of the deduction process. And that’s great. And there are others that if you give them that responsibility nothing’s ever going to happen.

Jessica Butler:

So you don’t want to do that and now it’s almost like 40 percent of the companies or maybe, even more, say that deductions or compliance group reports up through operations and maybe 35 percent report up through say it through finance some through sales. And again there’s no one right way. But there is a way that’s going to work better for your organization. So it’s thinking about that. So you really want everybody to understand that we’re working on this together so there’s got to be accountability. And in order to have accountability you’ve got to have some reporting or a dashboard.

Jessica Butler:

Again I have made some dashboards. It’s very simple like an Excel one-page for managing a whole bunch of different things. And senior management often once they see that then they start asking questions and it can be helpful. So if somebody would if somebody wanted that first thing if you also just write dashboard somewhere I’ll send that out to send just a few of those. So what’s amazing right. Deduction. It’s a company-wide issue. So you’ve got to get the company involved. And so part of collaboration right we talked about this rather than one group you’ve got to have cross-functional meetings you’ve got to get people together and you can’t just have like no agenda and you can’t say to people we’re going to meet once a week for the rest of your life who wants to be in that meeting.

Jessica Butler:

Like not nobody but if you say you know what I’m putting together this group we’re going to solve this problem over the next three months we’re gonna have a plan and an agenda. And we’re really going to have visibility. That’s a lot more exciting. Do that, pick something easy. You want some thoughts or tips on how to keep people engaged. Let me know. You know everybody’s got those people that all they want to do is complain. They go to a meeting they criticize they complain. So you have rules right.

Jessica Butler:

You say first everyone leaves their bags at the door. Baggage outside and then you have a rule like people like I don’t care like when I go and help facilitate this. They can hate me. I don’t care. The negative people I say no one can have a problem without offering a solution. And if you have a negative thing to say first you have to say two positive things. Before you can say it. So someone always says I don’t have a positive thing. OK. Well, you can’t say you’re a negative thing next.

Jessica Butler:

I mean that’s the rule. And people say OK, I like your sweater. I like it. And then. But people start to realize when you solve something and they see that that there really is it’s not blaming we’re not blaming each other we’re really trying to resolve something. It becomes a much more positive experience. Don’t assume that people in your organization understand what’s going on so often people that are not dealing with deductions every day have no idea what’s going on. I had a client where the finance department was painful for them.

Jessica Butler:

Every trade promotion came in. There was no documentation. I couldn’t find anything. So they had signature SAMs and signature Sally’s who had run around trying to get approvals to get these things done. So we said to the sales group and like 99 percent are valid. So we said hey how about if we just approve them we’re not cutting a check we approve these deductions we’ll give you a list of the ones that are that we’ve approved and if you have any problems get back to us and we’ll deal with it. And they said: Well what I don’t understand, why don’t you just send it to us and we approve them?

Jessica Butler:

And we explained that you don’t understand when it comes in. We put it on a report. We track it and we send you this file every week. We’ve got to put a spreadsheet together and on and on and on and so they agreed. OK fine. Just so you can clear them and we’ll let you know if there are any problems. And it made everyone’s life so easy. And we realized that they just had no idea of what was. And doing all of the work. So it’s really communicating. And how can you kind of partner with other people and how can you also like to use digital collaboration? If you’re using the DNS tool you know that it’s so easy to move deductions around, change the process or put your notes.

Jessica Butler:

All the documentation everything is right within one centralized system. It makes everything so much easier, so much better than email. I think I’ve won more so the last one is right. Leverage automation. Use automation. What we talked about we didn’t talk about cash application but I’m sure you’ve heard about it. We talked about pulling pre deductions pulling P.O. D disputing having auto correspondence to dispute is awesome. Why should you have to create a letter over and over? You know pick 20 deductions to say I’m disputing all of these and then 20 individual emails will get sent out all with the correct dynamic population of the fields that are important. It’s such a great way to take advantage of the technology and this isn’t even talking about all the great stuff which I probably have here. Oh yeah. The A.I. stuff.

Jessica Butler:

Yeah, we’ve heard a lot who has not heard anything about A.I. since they’ve been here. Fine. That’s what I thought. And if you want to hear more stuff tomorrow morning we’re talking about it again downstairs and it is real it’s great.

Jessica Butler:

It is. It can be the future of what you do as long as the information you feed into it is great. Right, it’s not magic. It can be magic to find the connections but it can’t be magic to say well you said this was invalid but it’s really not invalid. But I know it could have been invalid. So there is no if you do a great job manually or however you’re doing it if you do a great job of setting up what date the data is valid and not valid.

Jessica Butler:

It’s going to be doing a great job of finding patterns. So you have to do that first. You’ve got to be able to feed in the right information so that you can get the right data right. OK. Last thing and then we’re gonna go to questions if anyone has it. If you’re interested, this is a deduction management maturity model that I did. Right.

Jessica Butler:

So we look at six two four six things across the left-hand side. How well do you manage compliance requirements? How good is your cross-functional collaboration and then across the columns if you’re ad hoc you don’t really want to be there. You know you want to move up to be optimized and it sort of looks at different characteristics and different traits within each one. So for example cross-functional no collaboration yes ad hoc.

Jessica Butler:

It’s limited to firefighting. You’re reactive. We have routine cross-functional meetings. Great, you’re proactive. And then finally cross-functional teams drive continuous improvements. Usually within a system that’s great. So if you’re sort of new to deductions or you don’t really know or you want to see where you are. This is really a very good way to give you an indication. And it’s also a great tool for senior management because you can say here’s where we are in these areas we need to move up. And one other thing about that. So, happy to take questions. So if anybody wants a copy of that maturity model. Oh, there’s my name I printed out a bunch of them so you can come up afterward and take one. That’s fine. Any questions anybody?

Jessica Butler:

And if you want the deduction book. You can take that to a lot of benchmark information here. Anybody questions thoughts about what? Wait for Cassie.

Audience 1:

So we hear a lot about building a good process building, good people and building a good system. If you had to rank the three in terms of improving deduction which would you say would be priority number one two and three.

Jessica Butler:

OK. So I think I would say it’s a good question. If I don’t have people who can do it it doesn’t matter what I have. All right I mean it’s very hard. I can have a great system but if I don’t set up the right processes within that system it’s not going to be great. However, if I look at HighRadius and I think you can have terrible processes but if you’re using them to pull your backup will be great. So it’ll still be great even if you have terrible processes because you don’t need anybody but HighRadius to do that. But your processes then bring everything together you know really brings it together. But I think I would start with I need to have some people who get it. I want to have some people who really get it and understand and are and are excited about it and then and then you know I may look at a process put a little process together and then use automation if I just bring in automation and I haven’t even thought about a process I’m going to automate just what I have which is nothing but anybody else who anybody have an opinion about that. What do you think is more important? SARAH Yes you’re definitely more important what do you think you’ve looked at all of it. Oh, hold on, wait for Cassie. I’m giving you a couple of seconds to think about it and I’ll give you another flashlight.

Audience 2:

I agree on a lot with what you said. If you do have people there that actually get it that are committed to the success of it. That’s a good start but then process if you do not have good processes. It doesn’t matter you’re not going to have visibility. You’re not going to be able to give back to the business what they need because you are not gay and getting the data and then being able to present it back to them.

Jessica Butler:

OK. And I really think if you are and maybe it’s why I’ve done a lot of work with clients with HighRadius as they’re putting it in because it’s great that here’s this technology I understand their technology but I really understand how to process deductions in general. Let’s build them both together let’s build a process to take advantage of what that technology can offer and what it could do you know they’re gonna be on opposite sides front. That’s like the way it is.

Audience 3:

When it comes to implementing HighRadius for deductions How do you deal with the I.T. constraints that often? What is some of the advice?

Jessica Butler:

What do you mean?

Audience 3:

Yeah.

Jessica Butler:

Right now. What is it you want to talk about? You know it’s very interesting. There are always I.T. constraints. Part of me believes and you hear from HighRadius, not a lot of I.T. requirements. The reality is even those men the minimum that’s required. Just give me an A or extract just give me you know it still takes commitment from I.T. to get that information and that’s. So you really do need to have buy-in from them. And it is challenging. You can make it simple or you can make it a little more difficult. For example, what a great piece at the end of HighRadius if you’re using it for deductions is when you are resolving a deduction you’re issuing or you want like a credit request or a write off request.

Jessica Butler:

It’s really great that information comes right out of HighRadius. You would love to have your I.T. group consume it like build the consumption file within whatever your ear appears to be able to automate that process. My experience is it’s a great thing to have. That’s probably the most challenging part because that requires the most work I believe. Look for I.T. I think it’s really important to get them on board initially and get there by what I’ve seen is if they say they’re not going to do it or they’re going to find a way to drag their feet and it’s going to be a challenge and I feel and I feel with several of my clients that that is almost always the I don’t want to say the biggest issue in terms of oh my god major problem but it is usually what delays the project always. No matter what. It’s something with the extra that something with something and conceptually it’s not so hard really. Give me a stupid file to bring it out. Anybody else. Does that answer your question? A little disappointing but if you like it if you want some strategies and stuff I’d do a lot of negotiation so we can. What can you do? Anybody else. Yep. Oh, look at that barely a move. She barely had to move to get you.

Audience 4:

Well, my two cents on the topic and I’m not sure who behind the ass on the I.T. question. I mean, of course, you need them you can’t develop these tools without. Having system support especially if you’re trying to integrate with ICP and ERP and all of these things but one thing. Oh, and it’s Christy and Sony. I think I’ve got to say that we try to. One thing I think helps us. We have a trade spend system and we also use HighRadius. But one thing I think helped us get those tools and keep those tools for many years was really developing ownership in the business of the process and the tool.

Audience 4:

So writing really good requirements writing the test cases being very specific on how automation should work like not just saying hey I guess give us a system that we want and figure out the details and we’ll see you testing time in two months. Like they don’t have the resources to do that. Maybe it would be nice if they did. But in my company they don’t. So we try to bridge that gap while really taking ownership of how it’s really going to work and how it should work end to end how we want it to integrate with other systems.

And that’s skills in art. Those are skills that maybe not every team has in there. In their department. So thinking long term you really have to hire for that you have to hire people that are good with technology that can write system requirements. They can write testing plans. They can supervise people doing testing because these are all things that we need to do in the business to get the technical solutions that we want.

Jessica Butler:

Great. Thank you. One, one thing I have is a new motto for HighRadius. I’m going to tell them that they have to tell their clients or prospective clients. This system is not a do this to me or do this for me. It’s got to do this with me right. So you need to have someone in your organization in the business who’s engaged with the system. It’s like a living breathing thing almost that needs tending to and care to get the most out of it. And it can be great. You need to make sure that you are able to kind of invest that care into making sure it’s what you want.

Jessica Butler: Welcome, everyone. You know young kids should go to medical school. But my husband and I did not marry young. He's the same age as me. And that's a little weird. My son was very fortunate. He's at medical school in the United States. My husband is not. My husband could not get in the United States so he's offshore but he's (my son) finishing up in April with the classes. And it's kind of amazing. It makes me feel like what kind of drive and passion he must have to want to do this because it's been like two and a half years of no fun. Jessica Butler: So that was my fun fact though. Kind of weird. OK. Yes, I am Jessica Butler and I do a lot of work with companies. All I love is deductions, love trying to figure out how to improve what you're doing, how to manage it better. There certainly are some elements of deductions that are out of your control and there are certain times when I feel that retailers may take advantage. But there are lots of times when I feel that deductions are under the control of your…

What you'll learn

Do you know how much of your receivables are lost to poor business practices in pricing, ordering and fulfillment? Hear from one of the world’s leading deductions experts on how your A/R team could partner with business to identify root-cause and help prevent deductions even before they happen!

Prevent Deductions from Eroding Your Bottomline

Speakers

Jessica Butler

Transcript

What you'll learn

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