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ECOMMERCE
BY NANCY SANSOM
F
or too long, the B2B invoice to cash cycle has been a transactional and poor customer experience. An invoice is entered in a system and a payment is made on the other side, if you’re lucky. Throw in disputes, lost invoices, daily distractions, and more, and there is a series of ships passing in the dark moments that drag on for far too long. Both you and your customers are frustrated, and vital cash is tied up. COVID exposed the flaws of the B2B payments cycle and perhaps accelerated the digitization of the AR department by a decade or more. Necessity is the mother of invention, after all. However, for most businesses, digitization has boiled down to sending electronic invoices and automating existing systems. What hasn’t been fixed is the disconnect between the buyer and the supplier. At Versapay, we refer to that as the AR disconnect. The canyon of broken communication, misunderstanding, and frustration that your customers face when trying to do something as “simple” as pay you. So, while a digitized AR department might be more efficient, the experience for customers has ❱ DMN.CA
gotten arguably less human and more frustrating. Clearly there is a need to solve both for the automation and digitization of AR, as well as for a better and more collaborative customer experience. At Versapay, a leading accounts receivable (AR) automation company, we’ve witnessed firsthand several trends illustrating this fact. Business transactions TREND happen from anywhere While paper cheques have long been a primary target for digital transformation, they have remained stubbornly in the business payment lifecycle. In fact, many clients have told us that prior to working with Versapay they found it easier to process a cheque than to receive an electronic payment. Why is that? It’s much easier to match the remittance data of a paper invoice stub mailed in with a check, where all the data is on hand, than a naked sum of electronic money with no data. Yet, COVID tapped into latent demand for digital payments in businesses with more complicated business and payment transactions. Many companies have
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told employees, “You never need to go back to the office if you don’t want to. You can conduct business wherever you feel comfortable.” Faced with the alternative, stacks of checks in empty offices, businesses have no choice but to make the digital move to B2B payments. To make this shift as efficient as possible, you need technology that not only automates your processes but also fosters collaboration between you and your customer in order to make the process seamless and delightful. The old way of doing B2B payments is quickly being replaced by a collaborative AR network that enables your employees to manage business transactions from anywhere—accessing real-time account information, accepting all forms of payment (including digital), tracking history, and completing all the accounting work their companies require. Customers and employees expect TREND tools that make collaboration easier In nearly every area of the enterprise, cloud-based tools such as Salesforce, Google Docs and Slack have made it easier than ever
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for teams to collaborate internally and with customers. However, the AR department lags behind. As more businesses introduce technologies into their accounting processes, the temptation is to simply automate the way things have always been done — what we call traditional AR automation. But while transformation is the hot word of the day, the truth is that companies have a clear opportunity to empower the genius of their AR team by making it easier than ever for them to do their jobs and serve your customers. When your customers get an invoice, often they’re simply not ready to pay it. They may not understand the details. They may see that a promised discount was not properly applied, or something in the invoice was never delivered. Bottom line: they have questions. Traditionally, this would be the start of a painful and drawn-out exchange with accountsrecievable@ we_will_never_reply.com. This was always a problem, but COVID massively accelerated the pain. Suddenly businesses were forced to pay attention to both sides of the B2B transaction to streamline experiences between customers and the business. There JULY 2022
