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Published on: May 2008
Type of content: WHITE PAPER
Format: Adobe Acrobat (.pdf)
Length: 7 pages
Price: FREE

Overview:
Accounts Receivable (AR) is a top asset on a company's balance sheet and its management directly impacts earnings and working capital. AR performance is determined by the efficiency of the quote-to-cash business process. Control points include: customer acquisition, order entry, fulfillment, billing, collections and dispute resolution. Yet enterprise software providers fail to deliver advanced functionality that manages all of these areas. This results in:

▪ Higher AR balances (as measured by DSO, days sales outstanding)
▪ Bad debt
▪ Increased deductions and AR write offs
▪ Higher AR departmental overhead (collectors, deduction analysts and administrative support)

The AR department's responsibilities can be broken down into multiple sub-processes that include: credit, collections, deductions, order hold/release and sales rep support. Enterprise software providers like SAP, Oracle and PeopleSoft/JD Edwards provide little functionality to optimize these sub-processes. As a result, dozens of additional tools are used to manage AR including: email (correspondence and calendaring), fax machines, imaging systems, paper, Excel, MS Word, the Internet, file folders, and many others. These tools are not integrated; they are inefficient and degrade departmental performance.