How you (and your Team) can save Time with O2C Process Automation

How much are manual order-to-cash (O2C) processes costing your company? Invoicing is the lifeblood of profitable organizations—if you don’t invoice your customers, you’ll never get paid. But despite its undoubted importance, too many companies still rely on manual, inconsistent invoicing processes.

A manual approach is inefficient, time-consuming, expensive, and fraught with error. Further, it’s unscalable—companies can only increase their order-to-cash processing capabilities by increasing their accounts receivables (AR) team.

Fortunately, there’s an easy way to make your invoicing quicker, cost-effective, and accurate: automation. Let’s look at how O2C process automation can help you reduce human error, improve your order-to-cash processes, and enhance your billing and invoicing system scalability.

Reduce human error in Order to Cash (O2C) processes with automation

Did you know:

• An estimated 61% of late payments are due to invoicing errors.
• Late payments are one of the main reasons why businesses go under¹.

By reducing human error, automation helps you to get paid on time more often. 

So, how exactly does it work?

Automate your invoice generation

Use smart billing automation software to create correct invoices for a range of billing models, across all industries, and in any language. It can automate complex billing scenarios, apply country-specific tax rules, and offer smart templating engines to create fully customized invoices in seconds.

Thus, you can also combine multiple items and contracts in a single invoice, making life easier for your customers, as well as processing and invoicing multi-brand scenarios under one roof.

Automate your invoice to payment-matching

Are you spending too much time matching incoming payments to the invoices you send out manually? This is immensely time-consuming and resource-intensive. It is also why companies often rely on outsourced invoicing teams that number in the hundreds and sometimes thousands.

Only, there’s a better approach.

You can automatically match incoming payments to invoices by leveraging automated payment management solutions. Spare the time and hassle of manually digging through your invoices and payments to work out what’s what.

Improving your order-to-cash process efficiency and velocity

O2C Process Automation is quicker and more adept than people regarding data-heavy tasks, especially when it comes to creating and sending invoices. Let’s look at how an automated order-to-cash platform will bring to your business.

Increase your invoicing speed

As we all know: Cash(flow) is king. The quicker you send out invoices, the sooner you get paid—so invoicing speed is a core component of having a strong cash flow. By auto-generating your invoices and leveraging pre-made invoice templates, you can create, edit, and send invoices far quicker than using manual processes alone. If you are using Photoshop or Illustrator to create invoices, this feature was made just for you.

Measure your invoicing processing

O2C Process Automation offers automated invoices, which allows you to precisely measure every aspect of your invoicing operations. You can monitor how many invoices you’ve sent per month, whether these have been sent on time and to the right person, if they’re correct (e.g., contain the right VAT information), and whether they’ve been paid on time.

These insights reveal whether any aspect of your invoicing operations is currently subpar. If it is, you can take quick remedial action. As the adage goes, ‘what gets measured gets managed’.

Ensure your compliance

If you are a global organization, you face an uphill battle when it comes to invoicing compliance. Every market you serve has its own tax regime, meaning regulations differ greatly from country to country, invoice to invoice. These regulations are constantly evolving—as are your customers’ requirements, business models, and payment methods.

Therefore, you must keep a close eye over your invoicing processes: who’s completing them, whether they have a validation process, and how they are authenticated. They need to be agile and flexible, ready to adapt your O2C processes when necessary.

Leading billing automation solutions allow you to define accounting and tax rules for countries, and markets, and adapt to changes in the blink of an eye—meaning they can seamlessly create fully-compliant invoices for you. Check out our electric charging success story as a reference. Just as importantly, they work closely with you, consulting you on monetization and billing best practices.