Turn collecting receivables into a competitive and fun game
by Jack Large
As businesses emerge from pandemic lockdown, the dash for cash is intensifying. With revenue proving unpredictable and loans running out, many companies are realising that the focus needs to turn to accounts receivable. Rob Harvey, global director of solutions consulting at Sidetrade, commented: “ ‘Cash is king’ is truer than ever. For business leaders, it is crucial to create a much stronger cash culture, where every team is thinking about cash, whether that’s around sales, credit terms, receivables, or customer relations.” This is why SideTrade has employed new technologies to boost receivables collections.
CashTarget
CashTarget is a feature of Augmented Cash, Sidetrade’s accounts receivable platform. It has two components:
- CashTarget dashboard for collectors
- CashTarget team manager component to set goals.
Targets are set, by the customer sharing their payment items and draft items with Sidetrade’s data lake and predictive analytics to help managers set KPIs. The target is measured against the collectable amount and the cleared amount for comparison. This is computed based upon all of the invoices within the individual cash collector’s portfolio, and for team leaders through the consolidation of all of the cash collectors within their team, as the figure below shows:
Source & Copyright©2020 - Sidetrade
CashTarget enables managers and cash collection teams to track, allocate and manage collection targets at both individual and team level.
SideTrade claim that it creates a more comprehensive ‘cash culture’ throughout the business, right across the order-to-cash process, for all the staff involved, by giving managers real-time visibility of each collector’s progress towards their targets, and the team’s collective progress towards team targets or not, moment by moment, on whichever basis the team needs.
Boosting performance by linking fun and gamification to serious KPIs
To boost cash collection performance, Sidetrade’s R&D and product team have used game theory techniques, integrating game features into CashTarget to create greater visibility among teams and healthy competition between teams. The improvements are part of the wider picture of improvements reaped by using Sidetrade’s Augmented Cash – a cloud-based platform which uses big data, machine learning, and automation to enable a business to collect its cash faster, reduce DSO, reduce bad debt, improve working capital, and make collection teams more efficient.
Rob Harvey, added: “Everybody loves competition, so injecting a little fun into a cash collection application has a big impact on performance and user experience. CashTarget adds value to individuals and teams to give employees greater visibility on their own actions. Who says cash collection can’t be fun?”
CTMfile take: Improving cash collection has always been important, in today’s COVID-19 pandemic economy it could be vital for many firm’s very survival. The use of gaming techniques to improved performance may be just the boost collection teams need.
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