A collector’s day is much more than chasing invoices that approach the due date.
Although some of these tasks can be performed independently by collectors, the majority of them necessitate the collaboration of other teams or stakeholders. Dispute resolution, for instance, requires collectors to collaborate with the dispute management team, who in turn must contact several sub-teams to find a resolution. Pricing disputes are handled by one team, while billing problems may be dealt with by a different team. In the same way, unresponsive customers may be contacted by salespeople.
Let’s see how different problems in the collections process require different teams to come together to resolve them.
Collectors relying on various stakeholders to escalate
How it's done
When a customer is unresponsive to an agent, they escalate it to the sales team, the customer success team, or the AR manager. The sales and customer success team will try to find the salesperson who has the highest relationship with the customer. Since they already have established trust, the collection becomes easier and quicker. On the other hand, some invoices are escalated to the AR manager for intervention.
The challenge today
The collection agent should manually enquire and find the right representative for the task. The escalated comments are shared via comments or notes in spreadsheets that often go unnoticed or are very difficult to track and identify. Also, once the right salesperson is reached out to, it becomes time-consuming to ensure a proper communication record for real-time context to determine the status of the invoice. While this seems like a doable task for a few ten invoices or so, it becomes impossible as your business scales.
How can Growfin help?
Shared context eliminates back-and-forth communication driving faster collections. The Activities tab in Growfin will let you @mention the respective person to whom you want to escalate the invoice. You can also add tasks so you have a shared context in understanding who is handling a specific invoice.
Sales team relying on the collections team
How it's done
Many companies collect outstanding payments through the sales team. However, for salespeople to collect, they need AR information like the total collected, pending invoices, long overdue invoices, etc.
The challenge today
This information is usually available in the master tracker maintained by the collections team. The sales team ultimately has to rely on the collections team to fetch this data. A constant back and forth is normal in such cases especially as the company scales, and invoices get added.
How can Growfin help?
Growfin’s Salesforce integration enables salespeople to have visibility into the status of invoices within their CRM accounts, doing away with the need to log into Growfin. This shared context makes it easier for both teams to collaborate and resolve late payments.
Dependency on other departments for dispute resolution
How it's done
Major reasons for disputes in invoices arise because of the following reasons:
- Incomplete or incorrect information in the invoice
- Billing or implementation errors
- Late or partial delivery of goods or services
- Issues with the quality of the service
- Contractual disagreements
- Payment issues
Each of these disputes is handled by a separate dispute resolution team. In this case, whoever is in charge of collections, whether sales or the collections team, must contact the dispute resolution teams.
The challenge today
There’s no one place to record the status and audit trail of which team is handling what invoice. There’s also no single place for collection agents, sales teams, and dispute resolution teams to quickly understand the status of a given invoice.
78% of c-level executives, according to Wakefield and Versapay, say their AR team has encountered payment disputes that could have been alleviated with better communication.
How can Growfin help?
The Activities tab in Growfin serves as a central repository for all dispute resolution, providing a single source of truth. It contains various categories such as call, log, notes, email, commits, tasks, write-offs, and disputes, which enable users to access updates related to individual activities. For example, under escalations, one can view the recipient of an escalated invoice, or under tasks, the person responsible for handling a particular invoice can be identified.
Switching to collaborative AR
Irrespective of who is collecting today, shared context and visibility into data is the key. This highlights the need for collaboration between the finance, sales, and collections teams. A lack of efficiency in doing this impacts your collections target and increases your DSO. Not having the right data at the right time leads to productivity issues as there is constant back and forth. It also impacts customer experience negatively.
Growfin’s purpose-built finance CRM tool helps you streamline your invoice-to-cash process. It makes real-time visibility easier by enabling you to track real-time updates every 5 minutes! Growfin’s dashboard gives you a complete picture of the state of your AR as of today. It enables shared visibility which means your sales team can know the status of each invoice - open invoices, bad debts, overdue, current due, and aging.
Growfin has helped many unicorns including Intercom to effectively deal with AR bottlenecks. For instance, one of the major problems Intercom was facing was effective handling of disputes. They were using spreadsheets for data collation and used an internal ticketing system. This also resulted in their customer responses being siloed in their inboxes making it difficult to track and solve disputes. In just 7 months, we were able to help Intercom bring down their DSO to under 30 days from 120 days, the lowest ever in Intercom’s history.
Transform your AR collections through better efficiency. Reach out to us today for a personalized demo.
