Building Financial Muscle with HighRadius

Problems piling up faster than solutions is like stepping on quicksand! If your organization still handles disputes manually, it will result in open disputes, slow resolutions, poor customer experience, and a decrease in overall employee productivity.

BlackHawk Network Holdings, a service provider company, was facing these challenges while managing deductions. Their processes were time consuming, and the company had over 2000 pending deductions for over 2 years.

The company was also suffering from low employee productivity due to the lack of efficient inter-team collaboration. And, their customers had no way to view the status of their dispute claims which led to a bad experience.

The company’s Director of Global Accounts Receivable, David de la O Perdomo, said, “We needed a solution with global expertise, incredible automation features reducing tons of our manual work. The HighRadius team provides a world-class solution, and we have options and potential solutions to all our challenges.”

BlackHawk has 42 business units across the United States, Canada, Brazil, Mexico, EMEA, and APAC. So, handling a global user base with multiple currencies was complicated. Plus, their deductions team was completely dependent on the IT team for every small request, slowing down the entire process.

HighRadius’ deduction software improved the company’s deduction resolution workflow by enabling auto aggregation and linking of backup documents.

BlackHawk also gained real-time visibility into the status of deduction resolution with intuitive dashboards and reporting. It allowed for detailed root cause analysis and better insights into the deductions process.

Unlike other business processes, your collections process is what fuels the business! The collections team of any business is like an engine that powers its cash flow, business operations, and growth. So, if this engine is still outdated, businesses might find themselves struggling with revenue growth and business expansion.

An inefficient collection process can lead to poor customer experience, low productivity, and inefficient inter-team collaboration. It also affects the cash inflow of a company if the team is unable to identify at-risk customers proactively before they become delinquent.

Shurtape, a CPG company, had faced similar challenges with their collections team that manually handled the entire collections process. Moreover, its expanding business and piling accounts receivable were adding further pressure on the team.

Shurtape wanted software that would boost its collection process efficiency while ensuring scalability. That’s where HighRadius’ collections software was able to transition the company’s collections approach from reactive to proactive.

The software’s worklist prioritization capabilities identified at-risk customers and automatically stored correspondence information in a central database.

After automation, Shurtape was able to send chargeback notices to large customers as and when they arrived. Their collections team also saw better resource utilization & automatic gathering and linking of backup documents.

They are supposed to be together, but things are complicated! Businesses that cannot match their remittances and invoices efficiently spend a lot of time in the process and has low analyst productivity.

An example of this would be Addison Group, a consultancy firm that was facing multiple roadblocks in its cash operations due to a rapidly growing client base. The company’s analysts were spending 40 hours every week
matching invoices because the process was manual and remittance data was collected from multiple sources.

At the same time, Addison’s C-level executives had limited visibility into end-to-end operations due to siloed and paper-based processes. So, the company wanted to remove manual dependency from its cash application process to keep up with its growth.

HighRadius’ cash application software was able to turn around the cash situation of Addison Group by automating their remittance capture process. It also ensured that remittances no longer needed to be matched with invoices manually.

The software enabled the company to reduce the headcount required for managing cash applications to just one employee. Addison group was also able to redirect their analyst’s time to higher-value tasks like cash forecasting and management. It allowed them to achieve an 80% hit rate, with their team saving 20+ hours every week from not doing manual tasks.

Additionally, HighRadius enabled real-time performance tracking metrics such as unapplied cash as a percentage of AR and total deductions value with dashboards. Jamie Gabris said, “I’ve done a lot of implementations and a lot of integrations. And I would say the one that I did with HighRadius was by far the easiest that I’ve ever done.”

Slow and steady don’t always win the race! In today’s technology-driven world, businesses that process invoices manually eventually find themselves 4-5 times slower than the ones leveraging automated e-invoicing. Now, let’s answer the obvious question- Why do businesses still choose to stick with their traditional invoicing processes?

Fear of change and the ROI outcome are frequently driving factors in this decision. As a result, digital transformation of invoicing processes is a resounding NO. This leads to businesses having fewer payment options for customers, delayed invoices, low merchant adoption, and incompatibility with payment processors.

ResMed, a global healthcare company, was facing similar challenges, which resulted in poor customer experience and inefficient invoice processing. They wanted software that could enable their lean AR team of 17 members to do more.

ResMed’s team was responsible for credit-to-cash functions, including collections, credit management, payments processing, exception handling, and financial reporting. They handled the business operations of 7000 customers of different scales across multiple locations in the Americas (Canada, US, Central, and Latin America).

HighRadius’ e-Invoicing and payment software made sure that ResMed overcomes the roadblocks in its invoicing process by enabling multiple payment methods for its customers. The company also integrated HighRadius’ software with its online store, allowing users to view outstanding invoices, make payments, and more.

The software also provided interactive dashboards that allowed customers to view outstanding invoices and make payments through their preferred mode of payment. This not only elevated the customer experience but also had a positive impact on ResMed’s collections, improving the company’s cash flow in the long run.

People love surprises, but businesses don’t! If the pandemic has taught us one thing, it is always to be ready for uncertainties. The same learning applies to the business world. Companies that do not prepare for the unexpected might not be able to achieve their goals in the evolving business world.

However, most businesses lack the right tools to predict and manage their cash flow and possible deviation. This results in inefficient manual work, inaccurate forecasts, low visibility into future cash positions, and poor cash management.

HNTB, an infrastructure design firm, was facing similar challenges where the company was dependent on DSO and annual revenue for forecasting cash. Their accounts receivable(AR) and accounts payable(AP) teams were also struggling because of low data visibility.

Despite all the challenges HNTB faced, HighRadius was able to sort their cash forecasting and management problems. With HighRadius’ treasury software, the business was able to forecast AR and AP without requiring manual inputs, perform variance analysis, and have an overall view of cash flow categories.

Moreover, with complete visibility into its cash flow, HNTB was able to automate the reconciliation of statements to transactions and view global forecasts with drill-down capabilities into an entity or category. Through connected workspaces, HighRadius’ treasury software also facilitated easy collaboration between employees.

Now HNTB’s processes are automated end-to-end with direct reporting to the stakeholders of the company. They have also achieved a 95% accuracy in AR and AP forecasting and higher confidence among investors with accurate and timely reporting.

When we think about robots, the first thing that comes to mind is the hardware. However, there is a company, ‘Boston Robotics’, that builds incredible robots powered by such advanced AI that they can learn to do new things on their own. So, should we call Boston Robotics a hardware or software company? Well, the answer isn’t simple! However, we are moving towards a world where software technology is self governing and can operate independently.

If we think about the same in the context of the B2B finance industry, it’s crucial that businesses start their digital transformation journey today by implementing self-learning systems that are smart and data
driven. The collaborative power of Intelligent automation with a focus on continuous process improvement and leveraging big data could be the silver lining in improving operational efficiency and ensuring smoother
cash flows for your business.

We already use applications that have disrupted their markets using similar technologies, such as Amazon, Netflix, and Uber. In the B2B Saas space, HighRadius is doing the same with its data-driven intelligent Autonomous Software.