The Problem
Cash inflow into a company is vital to its operation, which makes the role of the credit and collections team essential to this purpose. However, daily tasks such as receivables cleanup, payment application, and others can cause account statements not to be sent as frequently as needed.
For a service center serving several markets in Latin America with a high number of customers and high billing volumes, this causes account statements not to be sent to customers consistently. This task is highly manual and can take 20 minutes per customer, with each team member handling an average of 15 customers. As a result, this account statement task takes 5 hours to complete.
The challenge was to download and organize the receivables for each customer into a separate Excel file. In each file, the information had to be organized by document type and due dates, and an email created with each customer's contact information.
The Process
Together with the credit and collections team, we established the metrics to account for in order to create a standard account statement that met the requirements of every market, designed the preset messages to be sent, and designed the step-by-step of the process.
- 1Download the receivables of the customers who were to receive the account statement.
- 2Organize and separate the information by customer.
- 3Add the due-date variables for overdue and upcoming billing.
- 4Create the emails with the agreed messages and attach the account statements.
- 5The team member adds final comments to the email and then it is sent.
Results Achieved
96% time saved
Significant reduction in the activity's time each month.
Error Elimination
Because the process is automated, potential human errors were eliminated across the entire task.