A dive into how Sidetrade’s AI can support your Order-to-Cash objectives
Sidetrade seemed to be the most advanced solution on the market, as well as the most reliable and sustainable. – Geodis
In the beginning, finance departments managed their collections process through some combination of their CRM or ERP systems, and manual collections. Without collections-specific technology in place, it grew increasingly difficult to manage the process, mitigate against risk of late payment, and monitor the overall success of the Accounts Receivable function.
In the 85 countries where our platform is used, 12.5 million invoices are imported into the system daily, with 150-200 thousand of these qualified daily. There are currently 11 million active buyers and up to 10,000 users connected to the system at any one time.
How Aimie Supports the O2C Cycle
When we started with Sidetrade we had as much “ as £4.5m in disputes – we are now down to £0.8m – Tenth Revolution Group
The global economic uncertainty means more than ever that cash is king, and companies are looking towards specialist technology to help expedite the dunning process through intelligent automation. With fewer resources available and less revenue coming into the business, CFOs are looking close.
Read the full report now.
Financial Director Report
Late payments have always been a thorny issue for businesses. But the pandemic has exacerbated that problem and hit industry hard, forcing companies to look for new ways to avoid credit risk and collect unpaid invoices.
When the pandemic reared its head at the beginning of 2020, many governments imposed unprecedented social restrictions that forced huge swathes of the business ecosystem to shut down for months on end.
Download to discover:
- How do late payments affect companies and markets?
- Technological advances and solutions to combat late payments
- What can firms do now to combat late payments?
The most obvious short term impact of invoices not being paid is cash flow pressure on companies in the supply chain – and this is something we are seeing happening right now
Technological advances and solutions to combat late payments
Corporates typically break down this late payments issue into three separate areas: credit risk strategy, collections and dispute management. And sectors normally have traditional ways of dealing with each of these areas – particularly around credit risk management. A company’s credit risk strategy is critical because it dictates how much credit that firm chooses to give a client. Get it right, and the client should be able to pay and keep cash inflows moving. Get it wrong, and a company can start to run into cash problems quickly.
Covid Cash Strategies: Conversations with CFOs
The KPMG – Sidetrade UK Cash Management Report
We interviewed CFOs across UK sectors to understand:
- how they managed through the first lockdown
- how management of working capital and cash flow forecasting helped them navigate these challenging times
75% of CFOs said that Cash had become the #1 board agenda item as a result of COVID-19. The remaining 25% Ranked Cash as 2nd highest priority or had already implemented a strong cash culture before the pandemic.
UK unpaid invoice performance lagging behind Europe
- measures late payments by country and sector in UK and other key European countries.
- analyses 80m invoices – £111 bn (€124 bn) of transactions
Key findings include;
the UK has consistently been the worst performer across Europe in terms of payment performance, reaching a peak of 43% of invoices on average remaining unpaid in May 2020 during the national lockdown.
In this Report KPMG and Sidetrade analysed how different industry sectors performed during the first lockdown, and how CFOs responded. The report identifies that three key areas of focus for CFOs were –Digitisation, Transparency and Culture. It highlights the Top 5 actions taken by CFOs to manage cash better during the Covid-19 pandemic, and how to improve visibility of working capital. Examples are given of different metrics to manage working capital.
Sign up for the report and discover the Top 5 actions taken by experienced CFOs to manage cash during COVID-19.
Use the power of AI to automate Accounts Receivable in
Staffing Services
Success in the Staffing and Services sector is driven by utilisation, so maximising revenue, loyalty and lifetime value from existing clients is critical. With many clients and high invoice volumes, credit management can be challenging, from setting payment terms to ensuring prompt payment and solving disputes swiftly. That’s where automation and AI can help, cutting payment delays, speeding up dispute resolution and accelerating cash into the business. Sidetrade is used widely within the Staffing industry to help them achieve dependable revenue growth and cashflow.
In this ebook, we look at how global recruitment organizations secure prompt payments, settle disputes faster and reduce credit risk. Leading recruitment businesses provide an insight into developing a Cash Culture across the organization. They also examine how implementing Artificial Intelligence has supported their Cash Culture.
We set an ambitious target of a 5-day reduction in DSO, freeing up £42M of cash.
Aimie: Artificial Intelligence assistant
Meet Aimie, Sidetrade’s unique Artificial Intelligence platform dedicated to the B2B market. The power of Aimie comes from the rich and plentiful business data which Sidetrade collects, highly advanced algorithms and machine learning focused on unlocking value from your customers.
Aimie users see measurable benefits across many areas
- 53% increase in collection success
- 51% reduction in wasted activities
- 46% decrease in payment delays
Supercharge your Cash Collection
How AI can boost your cash performance
In this whitepaper, we examine some of the challenges CFOs face in their journey to digitize and accelerate their finance departments. We explore how those challenges can be overcome using new technology solutions driven by artificial intelligence (AI), yielding improved cash performance and optimising working capital.
Today the order-to-cash (O2C) process for many organizations is still highly manual and often runs inefficiently. CFOs and IT leaders have made significant investments in ERP systems in recent years in an attempt to address this problem. However, while this has filled some of the gaps, the limitations of ERPs mean this even the most advanced can’t provide organizations with the capabilities needed to truly transform the cash collection process in today’s market.
The use of AI technology in Order-to-Cash software systems is delivering considerable benefits. Predictive analytics help in assessing credit terms or deciding the best actions to take to get payment from a customer. AI can also help process automation by taking over the running of key activities, streamlining cash collection and dispute management, for example.
The Need for Smarter Cash Collection
The COVID-19 pandemic is a harsh example of just how quickly companies sometimes need to react and adapt to unforeseen disruptions. One impact of the pandemic is that many companies had to rapidly free up cash just to survive the initial phase of the crisis. And in the medium-to-longer term, this need to improve cash flow and working capital will likely continue as global economies experience major downturns and recession. That means cash collection will be more important than ever before.
In order to improve working capital, CFOs will need to exploit the capabilities of new technologies that can drive improvements in processes and efficiency, and once in place they must learn to leverage their data for continued analysis and optimization. Bolstering this need for innovation, the majority of CFOs and senior finance executives acknowledge that more innovation is needed in finance. However, most companies are still struggling to get a handle on cash flow.
We discuss:
- AI in the order-to-cash process
- The need for smarter cash collection systems
- How AI can transform collections
- Augmenting the collection process with payment intelligence
Buyer’s Guide to Cash Collection systems:
How to procure AI-powered collection solutions to give your finance team a competitive edge
Cash has come into sharp focus in recent times. In the post-Covid-19 recession, firms which are smartest and most efficient at collecting cash will be in a much better position than those still flailing in the dark without intelligent systems.
Too many credit management teams have no dedicate systems to support cash collection. Instead they rely on spreadsheets and manual processes to manage the process, monitor collectors and chase customers.
When cash truly is king, there is an obvious competitive advantage in the early adoption and implementation of AI driven cash collection technology that uses a predictive analytics model to drive better actions resulting in more successful actions. When predictions are informed by artificial intelligence, the insights can be exploited in a number of different ways – to predict payment delays, compare and benchmark customer behaviour and trends, to prevent risk and much more.
Modern order-to-cash (O2C) systems use AI and machine learning to analyse and predict the payment behaviour of their customers, allowing them to propose best actions likely to achieve success. This then allows them to use the AI to automate large parts of the process, leaving cash collectors to focus on the small number of high value clients with more a personal approach.
AI can also support a better dispute management process, handling much of the administrative tasks like processing and allocating inbound messages. That supports the client management team in solving the disputes swiftly and successfully.
This buyer’s guide to Cash Collection systems aims to answer questions such as:
- Why have a dedicated cash collection system?
- What are the main benefits of AI in the order-to-cash process?
- Is the business in a position to benefit from intelligent finance?
- What information should be gathered from software providers?
- What are the key capabilities of a cash collection solution that will help win over the board?
- What role does artificial intelligence play in predictive finance?
For more information on how AI is being used in Cash Collection, visit our page here.