Facilitator [0:00]
Hi everyone. Welcome and thank you for joining us for today’s webinar to credit collections and sales Bermuda Triangle how AI is driving top-line growth with real-time visibility, brought to you by IOFM and sponsored by HighRadius. We have a few housekeeping notes to go over before we get started. If you have any technical questions or issues in the WebEx platform, please use the chat box and I will respond right away. If you have any issues with audio, please click on the phone icon above the chat window to receive the teleconference information. For those that do call in to ensure call quality everyone’s lines have been muted today. If you happen to get disconnected, you can log on again using the instructions provided in your webinar confirmation email. If you continue to experience difficulty, please email webinars at IOFM.com. And we will respond right away. We encourage you to ask questions throughout the presentation. Please type your questions into the chat box and hit send to submit them. At the end of the presentation, we will have our presenters answer questions. We will also have two polling questions during the webinar. A pop-up box will appear when we run each poll. Please choose from the multiple-choice answers and hit Submit. We would love your participation, participation, and insight. This webinar will be recorded and you will receive a thank you email with the on-demand materials within two business days. Our speakers for today are Judy Bicking, Jaicky Tammam, and Elaine Nowak. Judy baking APM is a senior trainer for IOFM and a 27 year veteran of Johnson and Johnson. Judy is a recognized pioneer and leader in procure to pay and credit management. After a successful career in AR and AP management, Judy led the development and implementation of J&J to shared service centers located in the US and Europe. These shared services are recognized as world-class handling over 200 decentralized companies and 2.5 million invoices. Judy also championed training for her staff investing in the team earning the IBM’s first AP departmental certification designation. Judy is a globally sought-after subject matter expert trainer and speaker. She has authored and helped to develop the IOFM Online Learning Center and as a co-founder and SME for the iOS MAP certification program. Jaicky is a senior credit executive with extensive financial management experience. He has a proven track record in achieving functional and corporate objectives. Through both strategic and tactical contributions in a complex, global, and diversified organization. Jakey has demonstrated results in driving revenue growth, reducing operating costs, developing long-term customer relationships, and improving productivity, a seasoned hands-on professional capable of interacting with all management levels. Elaine Nowak is dedicated to educating credit and AR practitioners about the impact of using an integrated receivables workflow enabled by artificial intelligence to improve key receivables operating metrics. Elaine’s mission includes working with progressive users along with industry partners to identify and share key insights on best practices at industry forums, conferences, and webinars. At this time, I would like to welcome our speakers and hand the presentation off to duty.
Judy [3:38]
Thank you, Kelsey. Over the next hour, we have a lot to cover. And we’ll review these key points, priorities of your C suite. The missed opportunities between credit collection and sales, the perceptions about the credit department, five best practices to achieve proactive credit management, and most importantly, breaking the data silos with cross-functional dashboards to meet the C suites expectations. Do you know your C suits your finance management’s top priorities and goals? When I asked this question at conferences, it is rare when someone says yes. If you Google the top priorities of the C suite, you will see these common goals: revenue growth at the top. This is strengthening and growing the profitability of the company. improved customer experience, why the longevity of the customer relationship and it helps to acquire new businesses as well. Thus supporting revenue growth. Mitigation of risk laws and regulations are tougher and changing regularly carrying extreme penalties, interest and even some prison sentences. Newly added over the last two years is artificial intelligence, they truly see the benefits of running the business from real-time and accurate data. How credit collections and sales collaborate together to meet the C suite objectives. The credit and collection and the sales team can act as the power players to achieve maximum impact if we draw a graph keeping revenue potential and risk as the primary axis, and typically the low risk, and high-risk high revenue are the zones where the credit collections and sales teams can deliver maximum benefits. In order to meet the goals of the C suite, AR credit and collections must align their mission and visions in their goals. Our number one goal is to protect the cash with limited risk. Does that really meet the C suites? Number one goal of increasing revenue? Does it really support the sales goals? The underlying truth is that due to lack of visibility into the process level data and lack of collaboration, these teams miss out on some very key business opportunities. This brings us to the sales perceptions of our jobs. They see us as roadblocks to approving sales orders. Pretty much their jobs are to sell, sell, sell, sell. They’re told if they’re breathing, if they have a pulse, sell them something. So let me ask you a quick poll question. And if you will key your answer in. We can then give you the results of how everyone who’s listening is in this category. Does your sales team consult the credit team before upselling to an existing customer? So if you can mark either always, sometimes, or rarely. While you’re doing that, I’m actually going to continue because it takes about a minute or two to gather the results. So is there a win-win? Is there a win-win for both credit collections and the AR team along the sales group? Is there a way to protect the cash and meet the sales goals together? How about exceeding those goals, a way to increase revenues and profitability how you can affect profitability is by having a process that’s efficient. Well, due to the current information gaps, the sales and the credit collection teams enter a never-ending loop of conflict. And at the end, the customer experience is hampered if real-time accurate data was shared and used as a tool to bring sales and finance together. It would be a vehicle for collaboration, developing a more effective, efficient process. And I’m going to go over a couple of examples. But first, our poll answers let me review them really quickly. So only 4% said that the sales teams consult the credit and collections Team 4%, sometimes 48% and rarely 48%. So I really think this supports the fact that we rarely talk to each other. We are definitely working within our silos. Let me just give you a couple of examples of how by breaking this silo and having the data available freeing up our time could it achieve what it could achieve? So let’s look at the supplier master file. It is not just a list of customers’ names and addresses. But if you combine that information with the AR customer account data, a sales list could be created that would guide the sales reps into who to call. Now, this could be created from customers who are not buying up to their credit line or where their history is so strong that the credit line could be increased for more sales. One that really hit home for me was alongside my career with Johnson and Johnson. I also own a retail store. And in that retail store, we purchase literally 1000s Dozens of dozens of items. So this one particular item that we purchased from a sales rep flew off the shelves. When it came in, though, the staff was so focused on getting it onto the shelves and building this display that it would attract the buyer. It sold out completely 100%. In less than two weeks, the whole display was sold. And no one not anyone in my store could remember what sales rep sold that product to us. They never called us, which meant revenue loss by them, but also by us because we couldn’t refill that order. Another way would be using the data to show new payment methods. If you could free up your time, and be able to really analyze the new payment methods, you could reduce or possibly even eliminate write-offs. Most importantly, these new methods could also help you keep from turning down sales because the customer might have been evaluated at a very high-risk level. And so you may say no to those orders. And instead, new payment methods could help you complete the sale. That means having current accurate data and time at the data from all points of view, we need to look at it from every aspect from AR aspect credit collections, the sales reps, analyzing and then changing some of our chairs procedures that are definitely antiquated. They served their purpose at the time. But today with new technology and new forms of payment, we need to open those revenue streams. Right now I’d like to turn over the presentation to Jakey.
Jaicky [11:59]
Good afternoon, everyone. Unless you’re on the West Coast, in which case it is still morning for you. And I guess we’re between you and lunch. So let’s get going. So why don’t we start with some common perfections? I’m sure many of us have heard some if not all of these at some point in our career credits. Look, the partners were the revenue prevention society. No news is good news from you. Credit is a necessary evil. We need revenue and you’re stopping us. Credit doesn’t care about revenue. And the last one, what’s the big deal? Just released the order? Come on? Let’s go. We need the revenue. So not very positive comments. So how do we go about changing these perceptions of the credit organization? So one of the things we can do is, we can start by understanding what do we see as our key responsibility? Depending on where you are, you may have an answer that says our key responsibility is we’ve got to manage the credit risk, or we’ve got to collect on time or minimize bad debt. This is what we’re responsible for. And these are all great answers. But ultimately, our key responsibility is really revenue growth. If we’re not contributing to growing the revenue in the companies we’re at, we’re really not doing our job, all the other aspects around managing the risk collecting on time, those are aspects of our job, but the primary responsibility that we have is revenue growth. And let’s start delving into that. We credit and sales teams collaborate well for revenue growth when it’s relatively easy, but the real battle and this slide will depict it quite easily for everyone if you look on the left-hand side, this is the easy stuff. And in a lot of cases, it just happens automatically. low risk, high revenue, those are the deals we can do day in day out with our eyes closed, and that’s the sweet spot. But if you shift to the right-hand side, this is the area where it’s a lot of work. It’s a battle. It’s a battle. The sales guys don’t look at any aspects other than it’s lots of revenue. We’re looking at the risk and this is where the collaboration between sales, and the credit team can generate huge rewards and benefits for the companies that we work for. So, given this environment, what can we do to contribute to this battleground and make sales feel like we’re helping them and contribute?
Jaicky [15:26]
The first thing to recognize is that no one size fits all, every organization is different. And even within an organization within the company, we may have strategies that differ by division by business unit. Different products have different challenges. So we’ve got to recognize those things. What is the culture, some companies are sales-focused, some companies have a DSL target that they’ve got to meet, whatever happens, other companies focus on bad debt. Sort of echoing what Judy had mentioned earlier, one of the places I had worked at in my career is a company called Lucent Technologies. I’m sure many of you remember them, they were in a spinoff from at&t. And in 2000, they spun off a company called Avaya. So loosen sales would probably be about $25 billion a year. And the joke was, we would sell to anybody if they were breathing, your breathing, we would sell you anything, we didn’t worry about it. In the year 2000, they spun off a company via inheritance, they were about $5 billion dollars. So 20% of it is loosening. The first year at Avaya, the bad debt write-off was $50 million $50 million, which at Lucent being 25 billion, nobody could care less. But at Avaya, $50 million was a huge chunk of change. But because the company’s focus on loosening was sales-driven, the bad debt expense didn’t really bother them. Another area to consider is what are the sales pain points? Do they feel that orders are always going on hold and that’s the whole exercise trying to release those orders or credit limits too low because we’re taking too conservative an approach? Is that significant manual intervention to get orders processed through the system? Understanding your businesses and the customer portfolio. Different customers require different levels of attention. So recognizing all those aspects that impact an organization’s communication becomes critical. We need to be viewed as a partner. You know, credit and sales will butt heads. But we’ve got to work on communicating with each other, which helps us be viewed as a partner. We also need to network with the sales leadership. Get out of our offices, attend sales meetings. And in case of sales meetings, don’t wait to be invited. Because, you know, as we saw from the poll response, we don’t generally get consulted on upselling deals. So I doubt if we’re getting invited to sales meetings, it’s better for us to go and talk to sales and offer to attend the sales meeting offer to prevent, give the sales folks an understanding of our perspective. And then by understanding the sales strategy in process, that’s how we built the better relationships and value add that we can bring to the table. So now that we have an understanding of our organization and communication, I’d like to focus on five key areas that I think will contribute to what we need to do to strengthen the relationship and make them see the value that we can add. And these five areas are where the opportunity is. Beta is your friend on how to get to yes, get out, and pre-screening stuff. Let’s talk about the first one: where’s the opportunity? So this is just an example of a company where the population may be gratified as our large safe bets, which could be you know, there’ll be our top five distributors, our top tier customers, so typically public companies low-risk investment-grade limits are given based on their credit rating. That’s the easy stuff that sits at the top, big revenue, lots of revenue, low risk, no brainer. The next tier is generally our bottom tier, bottom customers, let’s say $25,000. And below Low risk, low revenue, that stuff just happens. And it’s kind of a daily occurrence, no real opportunity there. But that middle tier, so let’s say for this company would be 25,000 to 3 million, that’s where we have the real value, that’s where we can work with sales, to attack the opportunities, that’s kind of almost the ignored population, that they’re not generating huge amounts of revenue. They’re not in the bottom tier, they’re just that middle piece that occasionally gets ignored.
Jaicky [21:22]
This is where we’ve got opportunities to upsell, raise credit limits, and really go after this and show what value we can add to the salespeople. The next focus area is data is your friend. This fact helps us as a credit organization. So use the data that you’ve got in your systems in your ERP systems to identify potential risks of customers who are bumping up on their credit limits, which will definitely present a challenge when they’re trying to upsell. So if you’re able to mine that data, and share that with the sales folks and say, we’ve got these customers that are bumping up against their credit limits, do you think we need to do a review so that you’ve got more opportunity to sell to those customers? In addition, identify opportunities for sales. It’s a similar kind of data that you would use in terms of customers bumping up against the credit limit. These are customers that have plenty of credit capacity. So these are guys that perhaps the credit folks, the sales folks don’t actually realize that they’ve got room for more capacity to sell to them. The third point is don’t limit your data sources. We use a lot of different data points to get information. So financial statements or tax returns are not the only source of information. One of the things we rely on at the current company I’m at is we ask salespeople to write up trip reports. Every time they go and see a customer. There’s half a dozen-plus questions that they come back and they fill out comments and they indicate to us things that they’ve observed. This is hugely valuable for us from a credit perspective. It’s hugely valuable to our credit insurers who look at that and feel that we actually have salespeople who are paying attention to the surroundings of the customers they’re visiting, you know, do they look at inventory? Is the inventory covered in dust? Or is it completely clean? Inventory covered with dust suggests that it’s slow-moving, giving us a perspective. Another area to consider is using your own payment history to determine whether somebody should be given extended terms or whether they’re good for credit. It’s way better than relying on let’s say Dun and Bradstreet pays x because your own history is a much better indicator. And then the last point, in terms of data, is don’t always focus on the problem. You know what some of the times when I offered to go and visit a customer, the first question I get from sales is what’s the problem? And my response is always there’s no problem. And that’s not usually the ideal time that you want to talk to customers when there are no problems because that establishes the relationship with the customer. So that in the event that there are problems, they have a pre-existing risk relationship and from the sales perspective, they see that, oh, credit is willing to work with me and help me. And they’re not just, there’s a problem, there’s a problem, there’s a problem, it changes the whole mindset of the sales folks. The next area, which I’d like to touch upon is, how do you get to yes? So, one of the things I told my team is our role, one of the primary roles that help us grow revenue is figuring out how to get to yes. Answer No, should not exist. So we’ve got to understand the deal. What’s the revenue? What’s the gross margin? What’s the customer looking for? What’s the risk profile of the customer? Are we taking market share by doing this deal? Are we displacing competition? What’s the payment structure? If we can get money upfront that covers our cost, then the only piece that’s at risk is the profit.
Jaicky [26:10]
So we put in payment milestones that will help us get to get to do the deal. And ultimately, that’s part of the goal is how do we do the deal? If the margin is good, we’re able to structure the deal. So try and get away from our standard? Well, It’s 30-day terms, It’s 60-day terms, It’s 90-day terms, look at ways to tweak the deal. So that we’re able to consider other aspects that help drive the decision-making and get us to Yes, and that’s where the creativity comes in and gets us away from being too rigid. With respect to our activities, and, I take that a step further when you’re creating your credit policies. Make sure your credit policies are not so rigid that someone would read that policy and say, Well, I know it’s black and white, the area of credit is very much a gray area as opposed to being black and white. And the more flexibility your credit policy allows it allows you to maneuver within those within a structured framework, as opposed to being black and white. The next area I’d like to touch upon is summarizing that, get out. Make the effort to get out of the office. I credit people who are very comfortable sitting in their office, looking at numbers doing credit reviews. But get out and visit customers. And always go with a salesperson, never go alone. Don’t focus on problem customers going for as I mentioned earlier, don’t visit customers when there are no issues where we’ve got opportunities to grow revenue. And the last point is always to provide a summary to the senior executives, that not only does this help to your own horn and show them what you’re doing, but it shows them the value. And it emphasizes what you’re doing to help the company grow revenue and you’re not just a back-office function that’s a necessary evil and the benefits from this. It improves collections because now they put a name to a face. It’s not just you know, Joe Schmo is calling me for money. Oh, I met Jaicky. I remember talking to him and he was trying to help me so you’ve got that relationship. And it also improves sales because customers feel that you know someone’s coming to visit
Jaicky [29:03]
I mean, it’s not just the sales guy, I’m important. And at the end of the day, it strengthens the relationship with the customer and the loyalty. And the last point I’m going to touch upon is pre-screening. So why look at pre-screening is pre pre-qualify customers before companies before becoming customers. It allows salespeople to focus on creditworthy cut targets, instead of them going out to customers that they’ll come back with and set and then credit says, Well, these guys are really a poor credit risk, we’re not going to be able to give them much of a credit limit, one of the things we do is we ask our sales groups to give me your target list of customers that you think you’re going to go after and will qualify them and tell you how much credit they could get. So that, you know, I’m better off spending my time on this group of customers, as opposed to this group of customers. It demonstrates the partnership that we’re trying to achieve between sales and credit. It’s also a very proactive process. You know, rather than sitting waiting for things to come to us, we’re going we’re reach out to the sales organization. And again, showing them how we can help them grow their revenue, save them time, instead of them wasting their efforts on customers, that won’t be good customers. And, sort of with that, I mean, these are just some of the things to think about. Again, this is not a kind of be-all and end-all. And if you do all of these exactly as described, you’re going to be successful. These are just some of the things to think about, getting credit people out of their comfort zone, and perhaps will, will contribute to, you know, a much more successful and proactive partnership. And at this point, I’d like to hand it off to Elaine Noah.
Elaine [31:21]
Thanks, Jakey. And Thanks, Judy. So let’s talk now about what a collaborative environment looks like. We got some great recommendations from Jaicky and some insights from Judy. And then how do we create a credit department that is focused on revenue growth. So I think breaking down those data silos, and the use of something and I’m going to show you some cross-functional task boards. They’re sort of conceptual, in the way that we presented them, but we want to talk about if we did have a collaborative environment, what could it look like? What kind of data could be shared cross-functionally, to really improve the relationship between the collections and the credit and the sales teams, and to really help drive that revenue growth for the organization. So first, I’m going to talk a little bit about what kind of data you might have from the credit management perspective and what that dashboard could conceivably look like. So when we look at the dashboard level, you really want to have data that’s going to summarize the status of all the various customer accounts with the credit department. And an analyst should be able to quickly identify where customers fall within the onboarding cycle, such as with a customer onboarding ratio chart, for example, or analyst should also be able to immediately understand where the blocked accounts are. Also, have visibility into bankruptcy alerts or other public financial financials and updates that are made available. Risk alerts can be segmented by various data factors, you could be able to choose from factors such as in this case, the example would be geography and showing the trend over time. A credit analyst would also want to see insights into the credit review cycle across the portfolio that can show where accounts fall within the credit review cycles. And from this view, an analyst should also be able to move forward with the next steps, including the ability to release blocked orders or to view pending accounts. Now, if we were to take the information and extract it from a collection of dashboards, and have this information readily available for the credit analyst, we could see integrated collections piece and it gives that credit analyst a better understanding of the accounts from a lagging risk perspective. So the credit analyst is essentially able to monitor when customers fall into delinquency. And in addition, knowing where your accounts fall within the buckets for say exam, for example, on this particular dashboard, the average day Is delinquent. That’s going to help your analysts stay on top of accounts that are in jeopardy and provide insight. So they can update credit ratings, and track the limits. And keeping track of things like a promise to pay records, allows me to have a clearer picture of the cash outlook and the potential impact on accounts. And identifying these top delinquent customers allows the credit analysts to take steps such as updating the Dunning strategy, maybe they want to revise it for a particular customer. At the dashboard level, if we were to look at data that would be extracted from the sales team, then we’re going to be able to see information that relates to identifying where they fall on the payment terms and discounts. For example, we can see additional information that talks about the overlapping of the credit limit utilization and where they are in the order pipeline. Jakey had made mention of the ability to have a target list where they can be able to qualify ahead of time. So seeing what orders are coming down through the pipeline, to be able to be proactive and look at the credit analysis for those potential customers. Now let’s take a little bit, look at the sales dashboard and understand what’s going on with the sales dashboard. So first and looking at the sales dashboard, we want to really understand information as it relates to the sales rep. The sales rep data dashboard should provide a high-level overview of the status of the representative’s various accounts, with options for segmenting in a drill-down such as a geography, as we see here in this example. You want to be able to see something like year-over-year growth, and you want to be able to compare it to the upselling and cross-selling opportunities for new business. And you will be able to see those trends for these selling patterns that will allow the reps to adapt their approach and their execution.
Elaine [36:10]
A sales forecast for specific key accounts gives a glimpse of what the closing is looking like for the year to come. And the ability to highlight neglected accounts allows the sales analysts to prioritize their workloads and put together a plan to connect across their account portfolio. Not the sales dashboard, then, we’re able to extract additional data from a collections dashboard. This would provide the sales team with a greater ability to look into key and critical accounts. And to understand the accounts that are at risk. An update to these accounts such as something like a new billing address, or maybe a change in the ship-to address, or maybe even a revised customer reference number. This keeps the teams on the same page about the counts and the key context within those accounts. So they all know when these changes are taking place. And changes that happen in any given department are then easily shared across departments. So the data is the latest and the greatest for that particular customer. Dispute data aging data promise to pay for information all that can be shared with the sales team. And that provides visibility into the short pays and the factors that relate to the blocking of orders or the changes of the risk levels, or the credit limit changes that might happen within an account. And showing the collection cast projections, for example, helps to level set the expectations for cash flow and accountability for inflow and outflow of the expected payments and account balances. So this helps to keep the collections and the sales teams aligned.
Elaine [37:50]
If we look at the credit extract that might be useful to a sales representative. This would help give them a better understanding of the credit data and keep them apprised of accounts that are in jeopardy and changes to existing accounts. So visibility into areas such as blocked order predictions, and credit limit utilization allows the sales team to be aware of these potential issues and the impact on the credit risk and limit setting forward within a particular account. And it can also provide insight into some of the decisions that the credit team makes. And that goes into things like releasing or not releasing a blocked order or extending or pulling back those credit limits for particular customers. displaying information about new customer requests and existing customer updates for things like payment terms also ensures that the sales team and the credit teams are aligned and in sync. Now let’s take a look at the collections that support and look for the collections team. How can cross Sharing data help with the updating that keeps everybody on the same page and instep across the account portfolio? So first from the collections analyst from their Overview Dashboard, you really want to provide a summary of data and information. So the analyst has better insight into their at-risk accounts. Dale’s days’ sales outstanding trends, this is going to provide a more accurate picture of typical account behavior. And if the account is trending in the wrong direction. Tracking the achieve versus target allows that collector to adjust their workload and their focus and account prioritization. And a quick glimpse into something like the top open AR accounts gives the credit analyst a sense of where to focus and the status of their T customers to the call to action. Now for the collections, and also they were able to extract some key credit data and view the status. Things like customer risk segmentation would help keep these teams aligned for the Atmos accounts. And this is also going to allow your collections teams to prepare for additional action that might have to take place. This visibility into things like credit utilization also would allow your collections analysts to stay on top of accounts, close to their credit limits, and then proactively pursue open AR to mitigate risk. A payment term display might provide insight into the customers that have longer-term payment expectations. And again, going back to that idea of when to prioritize the accounts that should be approached. So next, if we look at our collections dashboard with a sales extract, what kind of sales data could be shown here if we show this kind of data? Now the collections team has a glimpse across all the active accounts and has clear visibility into account ownership. And this order pipeline, I think this was something that Jakey also referred to as being able to align and closely see what new accounts potentially be coming down the pike. And then What could these potential new key customers look like? And what could their credit risk strategies become? The ability to view some deduction information also prepares the collections team for the possibility of what is to come, where things like short pays can be identified across accounts, and other information can be shared. So in summary, looking at how the different data and the collaboration between the credit, and the sales can really provide a much more visible, accountable, and transparent environment that really fosters a collaborative approach to understanding accounts, sharing information across accounts, and keeping everyone on the same page. So that decisions are being made in the most accurate and up-to-date, real-time data that are allowed. So now we come to another quick poll that we want to put out there. So the question is, would you want to learn more about AI-enabled credit and collections management? And how that could help foster a more collaborative environment within your A/R departments?
Elaine [42:27]
And as you answer that question, I’m just going to quickly jump to tell you a little bit about HighRadius. For those of you who aren’t aware of our organization, we are a FinTech enterprise software as a service company. And we leverage artificial intelligence-based autonomous systems that help companies automate their accounts receivable, and we recently rolled out a treasury management module. HighRadius is the only provider of integrated receivables for the entire order to cash suite. Our HighRadius Treasury measurement platform helps teams to accurately do Cash Forecasting, using artificial intelligence, with touchless cash management, and bank reconciliation. We as a company have more than 250 fortune, 1000 customers, on our platform. And just to give you an idea of the volume, we prosper, we process upwards of 1 trillion and that’s with a T of b2b transactions annually. We were founded in 2006. So we’ve been around for a while. Our headquarters is in Houston, Texas. And we started our journey by looking at on-premise solutions. And then we ventured into the cloud solutions for both for finance and most recently rolled out for Treasury by delivering it to the integrated receivables platform. And in 2014, we started to focus on AI Artificial Intelligence use cases for specific treasury and receivable functions. And today, our AI-enabled autonomous systems help finance analysts break free from clunky enterprise software and you’re able to make better decisions and improve the quality of work-life by automating a lot of redundant clerical manual work. So high res has been vetted by industry leaders. And we have strategic relationships with investments from the likes of Citi and Bank of America and PNC. high rated has a global footprint, we’ve done more than 700 implementations, across six continents, and in 45 countries. We have offices in North America, Europe, and South Central Asia. Here’s just a partial list of our customers. We’ve dozens of the largest companies in the world that use our solution. But more importantly, we are represented in a wide range of industries. We even work with a large number of midsize businesses and we help them keep their HR teams lean and efficient as they continue to grow. We’ve again financed transformation projects for 700 Plus customers. And just a quick the five modules are the main focus of our integrated receivables platform. It shows how these five core functional error areas range all the way from credit to collections. And they’re very mature solutions with deep functionality and robust case capabilities. And they were designed and built by HighRadius organically. So they have the same look and feel across the different modules with an intuitive workflow and an in-context integration that’s across all of the solution modules. So credit clap crowd cloud, sorry, it really helps new customers onboard and manages ongoing credit risk with existing customers automatically. EIPP Cloud once those customers are onboard, this EIPP solution provides a platform to engage customers digitally and gives them the option to view invoices to view statements. They can make payments, they can log disputes, and the cash application cloud is the most mature and robust of our modules. It also helps automate the application of payments once they are received and it eliminates a ton of the manual work involved in the cash application process. Our deductions Cloud helps manage short payments and resolve disputes faster. And our collections cloud is for customers. You know they’re out there, they don’t always make their payments or maybe their payments are delayed, so it helps to prioritize and follow up with those delinquent accounts.
Elaine [46:31]
Our Treasury services management solution that was recently rolled out has three main focuses Cash Forecasting, which uses artificial intelligence to data the process is a series of datasets sets like such as bank statements in outflows, customer invoices, and it provides the most accurate cash flow forecasts right from a ledger account and rolls up to the organization level. It’s able to forecast in areas such as AR AP, payroll, tax, and investments, and we integrate with the company’s ERP. We are ERP agnostic. So it doesn’t matter what systems you’re using, what accounting system you have, even if you have transportation systems, we’re able to integrate with that data. The cash management piece automatically loads and processes electronic bank statements. And it auto-classifies the transaction details so that you can see your operational and non-operational cash flow categories. And it centralizes your view of the enterprise-wide cash flows. So this gives you that visibility into your bank feeds and the rules and how it rolls up at what level and to what frequency. And lastly, the bank reconciliation automates the reconciliation of your general ledger with bank account statements. And it automatically processes statements. And it classifies the in and outflows in these various categories. Again, the AR the AP the payroll, the text, and investment. So at this point, as I’ve said enough about radius, I’m going to actually pass it on back to Kelsey and ask that any questions come in while we were on the webinar.
Facilitator [48:08]
Excellent. Thank you. We’re now moving into the q&a portion of today’s webinar. If you haven’t already asked your question or if you’ve thought of any more, please type your question into the chat box and hit send to submit them. Our first question today is about a perfect credit collection, sales collaboration. How would escalations work?
Elaine [48:34]
Did they specify a particular person to answer or just put the question out there?
Facilitator [48:39]
So the question was just put out there.
Elaine [48:44]
Okay, well, I suppose I could just sort of take a quick, I mean, a perfect credit collection collaboration and sales. That sounds great. But honestly, escalations are inevitable. Because we know that there are customers out there that are not necessarily the easiest to deal with. And so if you’re able to collaborate very closely across sales and credit and collections, then escalations could be suggested they can offer next action items. And that can be reflected in the dashboard. So if there’s an escalation that can be recommended based on this information shared across, then that escalation could appear in whichever dashboard, whether wherever it makes the most sense, or across all three of the dashboards just to share that information, and can be raised by any one of the departments.
Facilitator [49:39]
Excellent. Thank you. Our next question, I believe it’s for you, Jaicky, I believe you mentioned pre-screening your customers before onboarding them, what would be the steps involved in that?
Jaicky [49:55]
Yes, it can take any number of ways, typically, it would be reaching out to the salespeople, you know, understanding their strategy, if they’re planning on going after a certain market or target population, and offering to take a list of names, and getting back to them with a letter with some recommended credit limits. So when the salesperson is going to that meeting with the, with the customer, he already knows what kind of limit, he can offer the customer as opposed to sort of leaving a meeting and not having any information and saying, Well, I have to get back to you, I got to talk to my credit people and see what they can do. This way. He’s got the initiative and can go on the offensive by saying, you know, we’re able to give you a credit limit of X if you do business with us. So those are kind of the things that you kind of give the salesperson some ammunition to go in in his pocket.
Facilitator [51:06]
Excellent, thank you. And this question came in during your portion of the presentation, Elaine, how often should credit limits be reviewed.
Elaine [51:19]
So the way that you can set up an automated system, can actually be reviewed on a continuous basis. So a lot of times we have customers, they’ve got their 8020, right, they’ve got about 20% of their revenue comes from the biggest customers, or 80% of revenue come I got it backward. 80% of the revenue comes from a small set of customers. And then there’s a whole series of midsize and small-sized customers. And sometimes those smaller accounts don’t get the attention because they’re just rolling along. If you can set up an automated system that actually continuously reviews, customers looks at payment history looks at which buckets, the invoices are going out and getting paid and falling into an understanding and making recommendations on a continuous level, then you don’t have to set up an annual review by annual review, weekly review, you can do that. And you can set up alerts in the system where you have notifications to absolutely touch on those accounts. But having an automated system that will actually look through and make recommendations in a continuous fashion actually allows the teams to be on top of all of their accounts, and be able to set their credit limits, and be able to look at the blocked orders and all of that continuously.
Facilitator [52:48]
Perfect. Thank you. And our next question is just another general question. Referring to the dashboard. I have set separate collections teams sitting across different regions, each one has a different way of figuring out collections priorities, how feasible would the dashboard be in that scenario? So
Elaine [53:12]
When you build your dashboards and you have all these different collections scenarios, what most organizations want to do is they want to templatize the way in which the prioritization takes place for any kind of collection work because you want to take into account dynamic factors and you want to take into account static factors. So you want to have a dashboard that has multiple logins that you can have different regions logging in at different times from different geographies, but they’re all going to be a part of the same templated approach to prioritizing accounts. And so it doesn’t by doing that by creating a sort of a standard approach and way that accounts are prioritized then Everyone is collecting in the same type of manner. So this ability to have a dashboard that you can log in no matter where you are or what region you sit or which part of the business units you’re in. This gives that real-time visibility across the Collections Department throughout the organization.
Facilitator [54:21]
Excellent, thank you. And it looks like that was our last question today. If anyone thinks of any additional questions, please email them to webinars at IOFM.com. If you could please fill out the short evaluation form that will appear once you close out of the webinars so that we can better serve your needs in future webinars. And as a reminder, the on-demand materials will be emailed to everyone within two business days. Thank you again to Judy Jaicky and Elaine for a great presentation today. And thank you to all of our attendees for taking the time out of their busy days to join us. This webinar was brought to you by IOFM and sponsored by HighRadius. Thank you all and have a great day.
