Proactive customer receivables management for sales & finance

Many companies struggle to manage cash flow and to reduce days-sales-outstanding (DSO) as some customers do not pay their invoices in time. One approach to get customers paying is to personally approach them by the sales employees before just sending out not so pleasant dunning letters and triggering the cash collection process by financials.

In many cases customers which are short on cash, will prioritize those companies with whom they have positive relationship.

To do so sales needs a joint approach with the financial team to collaborate effectively. SAP Business ByDesign can support this by leveraging the powerful customer receivables management (including item aging analytics) and the customer activity management which is well known for marketing, sales and service processes (CRM) but not so well known for payment management. With this you can:

• Keep track on customer receivables aging to identify most critical customers with open payments.
• Proactive management of revenue collection by triggering and monitoring customer facing activities.
• Increase Cash Flow & reduce Day-Sales-Outstanding by identifying issues and actively communicating & monitoring payment agreements.

Here is a demo on how this works in detail:

To setup this process you need to do the following three steps:

1. Configure Activities

1. Define a new activity category in the “Activity Categories“ configuration
2. Create the new activity category “Payment Management”
3. Assign the new category to the activity types

2. Report setup (including defining a restricted key figure)

1. Define a new report based on the standard “All activities” data source
2. Configure a restricted key figure for “Payment Management” activity category only
3. Define the reports views for accounts and employees with the right chart types
   

3. KPI setup and embedding into overview pages & launchpad

1. Define a new KPI in the analytics work center
   
2. Link it to the newly created report and its views to the new KPI
3. Embed the KPI into the overview page or the Launchpad

In the SAP Business ByDesign PartnerEdge community registered partners can download a detailed demo and setup script

More details on customer analytics can be found here:

• Embedded customer analytics based on SAP HANA is one of the key strength of ByDesign.
• Monitor lead quantity and quality in marketing
• Monitor projected sales volume with targets, opportunities and actual sales
• Monitor critical customer payment activities
• Track campaign success by generated revenue
• Monitor customer discounts by team, product or customer
• Sales target planning and tracking incl. pipeline simulation

This blog post is part of a series of blog posts introducing KPIs for process monitoring and optimization purposes Process Monitoring and Optimization with KPIs.