How CFO’s Can Optimise Cash Flow & Deliver Growth

Through Order-To-Cash Digital Transformation

The role of the CFO has become increasingly complex. To see success now, modern CFOs and financial teams have a growing array of responsibilities including managing “big data” across the business to ensure a growing, agile and sustainable business. New regulations, tax laws, corporate governance awareness – plus the requirement to generate reports that provide decision makers with actionable real-time insight – all add to the complexities and challenges CFO’s face ensuring they optimise cash flow and deliver growth.

Within this complex landscape, CFOs still need to be able to gain clear visibility across their business and finance processes, to enable data-based decisions that will:

• Mitigate risk in an economically volatile market
• Ensure optimum efficiency throughout the business
• Ensure business continuity and data integrity
• Build customer satisfaction and loyalty

However, as processes have evolved, within legacy systems, achieving that visibility is difficult.

But, modern technology can provide a solution. Today CFOs are taking the lead in deploying the technology they need, to provide the insight for success. One area where modern technology can deliver big wins is within the order to cash process; with a digital transformation through a SaaS solution that delivers intricate visibility, real-time intelligence, easier data management and actionable insight for finance professionals.

How Order to Cash SaaS Solutions Can Transform How Modern CFOs work

Regardless of industry, technology has transformed modern business. And for CFOs, financial operations automation technology, such as an order to cash SaaS system presents a substantial opportunity. With the right solution in place, CFOs can gain visibility over processes in a way that allows them to make agile strategic decisions to drive process improvements, cost efficiencies and ultimately optimise the businesses cash flow and deliver growth.

Essentially, the latest developments in financial operations solutions provide a new level of transparency, insight and analysis over legacy processes, which have previously been either inaccessible or incredibly complex to find.

4 Ways Order to Cash SaaS can Transform Your Business

1. Manage Risk and Economic Volatility

Enabling a business to mitigate the risk of economic uncertainty is hard, but digitally transforming the order to cash process can help CFOs achieve this. By recording and viewing customer behaviours and historical data, it’s possible to generate predictive algorithms that intelligently mitigate risk and identify opportunities.

By anticipating future behaviour, algorithms can be run to guard against a range of scenarios; upturns or downturns in market conditions, changes in a customer’s business and more. The right solution is a CFO’s answer to predicting how to optimise potential revenue from customers, whilst minimising the risk of bad debt.

Of course, a good digital solution will not just provide you with this data. It will automatically alert you of potential risks. This is important when risk can be inherently unknown and unexpected. With automated notifications on risk and mitigation strategies, CFOs are able to not just respond to risk, but proactively manage and prevent it.

2. Enable Business-Wide Efficiencies

This level of process automation can … automate repetitive tasks to free up your team to focus on areas where they can deliver the greatest impact

Traditional, non-digital processes often go hand-in-hand with inefficiencies and a lack of visibility. Not only are they often labour intensive and slow, but without visibility, how can issues and improvements be identified and actioned?

Order to cash process automation SaaS can provide a clear view of traditionally disparate and dense data, enabling you to make data-driven decisions about the most optimal way to configure your processes.

This level of process automation can also assist with human capital management. It can identify and automate repetitive tasks to free up your team to focus on areas where they can deliver the greatest impact. Overall, this visibility over process and people allows CFOs to reduce unnecessary costs, optimise cash flow and deliver growth with clear, actionable insights. However, this is not an addition to take lightly; it could require a restructure of teams and a reduction of headcount as the content and volume of work is changed and reduced.

3. Ensuring Business Continuity and Data-Driven Decisions

For CFOs to make informed decisions and implement clear business goals, they must ensure that the data they have is of a good quality and integrity, is secure and in line with regulation.

Yet this can be difficult for organisations with complex processes. It’s here that strong automation and real-time analytics help. Working to simplify the complexity of business processes, the right solution can:

• Ensure better data integrity by creating a single repository of real-time information. (Allowing all (authorised) staff to access the same, up-to-date information – rather than using multiple systems and manual data sharing).
• Ensure GDPR compliance by recording and date-stamping activity.
• Enable real-time reporting for more proactive, informed decisions across the business.
• Deliver greater customer satisfaction as a result of all staff having access to the same up-to-date insight (so unnecessary or duplicate contact would not be made for example).

By highlighting actionable insights and transparent data it also puts the CFO in the driving seat in terms of partnering CEOs with compelling directions and data-driven decision, making.

4. Build customer satisfaction

Ongoing satisfaction leads to loyalty. A digital transformation of your order to cash process can deliver a competitive advantage by building your customers trust and satisfaction. The right solution makes businesses easy and efficient to work alongside, from the moment customers are on-boarded by:

• Ensuring all contact and communication is necessary and informed.
• Closing gaps between departments with one real-time data repository.
• Enabling swift resolution of issues and disputes with an automated workflow system.
• Highlighting and addressing repeated issues.
• Identifying and rewarding good performing customers.

Once customers have placed trust in a company and are assured that the company will continue to deliver, they will grow to be not just loyal, but advocates who go on to promote your company through word of mouth and referrals. It is far easier to grow your existing customer base by 10% than deliver an additional 10% of new customers.

Building the Case for Order-to-Cash Digital Transformation

In light of the above, it’s clear that an intelligent, insights-driven order to cash solution can bring a lot to organisations: including improved process efficiency, risk mitigation and more accurate reporting for informed strategic planning – which as many leading organisations and CFOs already know, creates the right environment to optimise cash flow and deliver growth.

Text written by Richard Brown .

CRO of Global Debt Recovery & Customer Contact provider 4D Contact.