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Fast Cash: How to Speed Up Invoicing

Invoicing takes much too long: It's a classic problem dumped at the door of many an IT department. Here's how one company took a fresh look at its poky process following an ERP revamp and cut days from cash collection.

By Laurianne McLaughlin

October 04, 2007 — CIO — RTC had a fervent desire to cut time from its cash collection process. That's a desire that many companies spend countless hours and dollars trying to realize: Everyone would like to get paid faster by customers. This privately held Chicago-area company (with about $150 million in revenue) specializes in retail marketing systems, providing services ranging from store design to fixtures, for clients such as Anheuser-Busch, Hasbro, Gillette and Target. RTC knew that it took too long for its shipping information to hit the accounting group and then customers, says Scott Coffman, RTC's director of information services.

The company ships two ways, sending small packages directly to customers via the usual shipping services, and sending larger, full-truckload shipments from its loading docks right to customers. When a truckload of product left RTC's shipping docks for delivery, an unwieldy internal process began, Coffman says. A full-truckload delivery meant the company created a bill of lading document that needed the driver's signature, the truck number and related details. "That was difficult to capture," Coffman says. "It was very manual." Those bills of lading were scanned, sent to accounting, collated and matched up to invoices, which were then mailed out. The whole process took about two days.

"We struggled for years with this," Coffman says. "We tried Adobe, Web pages, you name it. When a driver hits our dock, they're under the gun. We were unable to capture the signature and match it up to the necessary documents quickly. It took too many steps."

In the summer of 2006, RTC began an order-to-cash initiative to take a fresh look at the cash collection problem. A cross-functional group, including IT, accounting and finance team members, mapped out the related processes and looked for bottlenecks, Coffman says. "This supporting documentation piece [involving the bill of lading] stood out," he says. In October 2006, RTC did an ERP conversion, choosing Infor's ERP platform. At this time, the company also implemented StreamServe's enterprise document presentment technology (specifically, the Connect for Infor product) to better automate its handling of purchase orders, invoices and related shipping documents.

The ERP rollout went off well and on time in October, Coffman says, and the StreamServe technology started helping simplify invoices for customers and internal documents for RTC employees. (Among other capabilities, StreamServe can customize or skinny down internal documents for internal groups, customers or business partners.) But it was a while, he says, before "the lightbulb went off."

 

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