Did you receive your AR statement this month?
Before the advent of easier, more sophisticated methods, most businesses would mail AR statements to their customers. Every customer received a paper statement of their account activity, just as you’d receive a credit card statement each month. That was the way everyone did it.
You can imagine the cost of postage for mail going to every customer. Eventually, new methods became available in the form of email, and that signaled a significant change. Now there is a more efficient, timely, and less expensive way to improve your billing and thus your collection process.
Most ERP solutions allow you to generate an AR statement that you can attach to an email, but the process isn’t always straightforward.
When we were using Microsoft Dynamics GP for our billing processes, we came up against questions such as:
- How many people will receive this statement?
- What will the statement look like?
- What kind of communication do we include with the statement, and how can we ensure that the attached communication gets to the right team member or to multiple team members?
- How can we be sure that the email isn’t ignored because of looking like a generic email?
We knew how we wanted out AR statements to look, but we couldn’t make it happen with Dynamics GP. At the very least, we would need an add-on product that could send alerts.
Now we use Acumatica for our business processes, and it has made a huge difference.
“The ability to easily email Accounts Receivables statements in Acumatica that we can customize and format in a way that appeals to our customers has greatly improved our collections process. Now customers can see a list of open invoices, payments, credits, and pre-paid balances.” George Mackiewicz, CAL Business Solutions
Our story: Moving from Microsoft Dynamics GP to Acumatica: A Journey To a Single Version of the Truth
Acumatica Cloud ERP allows us to customize our AR statements with our logo. We have also embedded a message at the bottom of each statement with a hyperlink labeled “Back office system powered by Acumatica” (which is nice marketing for us) and a link labeled “click to pay” with our integrated credit card vendor.
AR statements are different from simple invoices. Our AR statements show not only current charges but also a list of all paid and unpaid invoices with balances carried forward, pre-payments, and background data.
We no longer have customers telling us that they didn’t receive an invoice or that they don’t know how much time is left on their pre-paid block of hours.
Sending out AR statements really makes a lot of sense. And the fact that we can introduce those statements in a way that is informative and clear to our customers makes life easier for them and for us.
We’ve been able to simplify our collections process with Acumatica, and so can you.
If you’d like to know more about the advantages of Acumatica and what it can do for your business, contact CAL Business Solutions at 860-485-0910 x4 or sales@calszone.com.
By CAL Business Solutions, Acumatica and Microsoft Dynamics GP Partner, www.calszone.com
