One Big Company or Several Small Businesses?
Since the pandemic, the number of buyouts and takeovers has risen sharply. One common action after a merger or acquisition is standardisation. Getting rid of duplicate systems and bringing all processes and data onto one platform makes sense operationally, but it also helps companies benefit from economies of scale.
Creating one company culture from a set of strategic business units isn’t easy: it’s a mindset shift from small business thinking and autonomous operating entities to a corporate way of working that relies on standards, rules and commonalities.
In our role, helping companies radically improve their profitability and cash flow through AR automation, we often find companies with a heterogeneous array of accounting and ERP systems. One such is Sage Intacct.
Outgrowing Medium-Sized Thinking
Sage Intacct is great for small and medium enterprises. Still, if you operate at scale and with a large stock list of items, several small business software packages won’t make one efficient corporation. Once you outgrow what is a good solution for SMEs, you need enterprise-grade solutions. And that’s where we come in.
According to a survey of 1,600 accounting staff conducted in 2021 Sage Intacct themselves, automated systems speed up the financial close process by two days on average. Think about this: Sage Intacct interviewed the accounting staff, probably of the small and medium-sized businesses they serve.
From our own experience, the benefits of automation for enterprises are literally on a different level. We think that financial close processes can be shortened by at least 4 days with Corrivo.
Rapid Return on Investment
One of our clients told us early on when they moved to Corrivo that the system paid for itself in the first month by saving them from dealing with copy invoice requests and queries. Throwing more people at the problem wasn’t going to work. They had to enable customers to self-serve copy invoices and eliminate the opportunity for excuses, such as: “I didn’t receive the invoice.” Fewer people and more intelligent automation was the solution.
They applied their manufacturing thinking to their finance department. What Corrivo did for them acted as the production machinery that created and handled those invoices. It was less a case of having artisan credit teams hand-producing every invoice and sending it out, and more a case of an invoice factory, where invoices came off the production line effortlessly and efficiently.
Bruno Koch, the author of a Billentis report in 2015, estimates that electronic and automated invoice processes can result in savings of 60-80 percent compared to traditional paper-based processing, so if paper is your starting point, the economic benefits of Corrivo are going to be substantial.
Ongoing Dividends
Corrivo keeps on delivering financial benefits long after implementation. One client cut their Days Sales Outstanding by 8 days when they moved to Corrivo. They also noticed fewer invoice queries and disputes were raised, which they put down to the improved accuracy and timeliness of the invoices.
This, in turn, resulted in a lower churn rate amongst staff who went from high-pressure roles to high pleasure careers. The ability to analyse, problem-solve, and recommend new tactics were always there in their team, but it never happened without the time or the data they needed.
Those same staff were able to spot opportunities for further improvements and curb potential issues before they become harmful to their cash flow.
One Company
Amongst our clients, very few operate only in one country, which usually means more than one legal entity, currency and language are involved. Despite being geographically dispersed or assigned to different divisions, all credit control staff can work closely together by being organised in teams and by sharing the same cloud platform: Corrivo. Data segregation is possible, role-based or team-based divisions are possible.
Still, as a company, the reporting process and the group financial accounting processes are so much easier because of having an AR platform across the enterprise that is as up to date as the ERP system.
