Top 3 ways to ease your collections management load using automation

Chasing overdue payments is probably the toughest part of the job for any accounts receivables team. They will have honed their skills over time to spot the genuine excuses from the many thrown at them and will have developed a thicker skin than most after what can only be described as an unwelcome phone call.

It’s also probably one of the most time consuming and unrewarding parts of their jobs. Now I’m not promising that these calls will get more pleasant, but if you read on, you’ll find 3 ways that make this task less time consuming, easier to manage and may result in making fewer calls by giving you tools that soften up the errant payers to make those calls easier.

It may well be cliché but we all know cash flow is the very lifeblood of any business. Effective collections processes are therefore critical to the financial stability of your business. This is where MS Dynamics Business Central and a collections management solution like Zetadocs can make all the difference and help minimize any negative cash flow consequences.

Ratcheting it up

Zetadocs Collections Management integrates directly with the MS Dynamics Business Central reminder levels feature. Zetadocs extends this great feature by connecting directly into your carefully crafted reminder messages for each severity level when its converts the reminder to a PDF for emailing. e.g. 30 days - Overdue, 60 days – Final demand, 90 days – You’ve been handed over to collections agency. Emailed reminders encourage dialogue with customers to resolve payment issues early and will help you reduce debtor days.

We hear that the final reminder level works most effectively as a sternly written letter addressed directly to the Accounts Payables Team, rather than the bill to contact. The Zetadocs hard-copy printing feature makes this an option for the final level, and it just means you need to stuff and mail these letters manually. Hopefully you do not need to send many of these.

Also if you are not yet using Business Central reminders, they are really simple to setup or alternatively Zetadocs can work with your customer statements too, if that’s how you chase your overdue accounts.

Automation is key

You may be happy to manually email overdue reminders or customer statements individually using Business Central. However using an automated solution that can email these documents in batches, attaching conditions of sale, and switching the email body based on the reminder severity level can really speed things up and make the whole process less of a chore.

You can even take it one step further and save even more time by fully automating the production of these documents by scheduling the emails so that they are emailed automatically when they become due. This added benefit means that the entire collections process can be automated for the accounts receivables team, using NAV scheduled tasks. You’ll be surprised at how much time automating this process will actually save you.

Dealing with objections upfront

We’ve all heard those favourite excuses of “I’ve misplaced your invoice”, “It’s not been received yet“ or even “I never placed that order”. Automatically attaching copies of invoices, or even signed proof of delivery notes (PoD) for each outstanding invoice on the NAV reminder, then overlaying “Copy” text onto each attached invoice not only saves significant time when collating these communications, but it handles that favourite objection upfront.

By ensuring that the right people have access to the right documents at the right time overcomes inefficiencies in your customer's business, can resolve disputes quickly and lead to earlier payment.

Want to learn more?

You can read all about our Collections Management solution here, or catch up on our latest webinar where you can see the solution in action. If you can’t wait we’ll be more than happy to show you if you email us at sales@equisys.com. You too could soon be realizing the benefits of Zetadocs that customers like Debbie are seeing:

“Each day we are saving at least 2 working hours with Zetadocs. This equates to 1 week every month. As well as making life easier, we have reduced our delivery costs and fine-tuned our order-to-cash process.”

Debbie Tabrett, Credit Control Manager, Man and Machine Ltd.