As businesses continue to navigate the challenges of 2023 and beyond, the need for streamlined and efficient processes has become more pressing than ever. One area that has seen significant improvement in recent years is accounts receivable software.
At Carixa, we have made it our mission to provide the most effective automation for cash application, deduction automation, collection dunning and credit management. We strive to ensure that our platform is always evolving to meet the needs of our clients and partners.
Last year we enhanced our accounts receivable software platform in several key areas. These changes, based on feedback from our clients and partners, are stepping stones towards that mission.
2022 Product Milestones
Dashboards
In 2022, we launched new Executive and Deductions dashboards, bringing together portfolio-wide Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for receivables. The dashboards include more than 20 carefully selected metrics, such as Days Deductions Outstanding (DDO) or Collections Efficiency Index (CEI) and cash forecast tools.
In addition to visuals like charts and graphs, the dashboards provide a click-through experience to the detailed tables behind them. We will continue to improve this feature and provide further depth to the data.
Standard reports
We created a standard set of reports that any client can utilize to quickly gather metrics on receivables performance. These reports were derived best practices across our client base. These reports create insights for your team in these areas:
Aging – helps your team better understand where your problems lie
Transactions – track your cash application, offset and adjustment process
Trends – illustrate performance metrics that are moving up and down over time
Performance – show what your analysts are working on now and what should they focus on next
Configurable reports
When combined with standard reports, configurable reports empower our users to build almost any report from the data we host for them. As an added feature, we can make the data accessible inside a PowerBI environment if the organization has an existing license. Our inspiration was two-fold:
1) Beat the constraint of current reporting limitations in enterprise planning systems.
2) Create a platform that is more simple and yet flexible than other complex business intelligence tools on the market today.
Carixa’s 2023 Roadmap
Our customers and partners have increased focus on profitability in the new cash-constrained environment. Deductions and slow pays continue to be a huge source of revenue leakage for them in 2023, and we expect this trend to continue as customers like retailers and distributors feel greater pressure on margins.
To meet this challenge, Carixa will focus our 2023 platform investments on areas that will speed up two fundamental goals of a deductions team: reduce Days Deductions Outstanding (DDO) and increase recoveries percentages.
Increase Deductions Automation to Improve Process Efficiencies
AR teams are inundated with collecting documents to support deductions and disputes on invoices. They must review them, check values against their internal systems, then decide whether to give the customer a credit or dispute the claim. Automation like Robotics and Machine Learning can make these research processes much quicker.
Equally important, automation can be used to validate deductions, seamlessly generate credit memos/write offs and issue disputes for recovery.
Invest in Reporting Capabilities
In the age of data mining and technology, businesses need accurate reporting to dive deeper into deductions trends, especially regarding root cause analysis. That’s why we made our reports configurable. Going forward, we intend to provide clients the granularity needed to identify issues at the SKU or department level. This capability will improve how organizations identify the root cause for a deduction, rally cross-functional teams to action and resolve claims faster.
Enhance Carixa Cash Application Module
Our cash app software module is unique in that it is deeply integrated with our deductions capabilities. Every day, as cash is applied, our system intelligently generates deductions actions that need attention from multiple stakeholders across the enterprise.
Creating an intelligent workflow around this ensures that:
- Collectors always have the most up-to-date invoice data
- 100% of cash closes within the day
- Deductions teams save a tremendous amount of time from smart processes
Going forward, we want our cash application module to allow exceptions to be managed through enhanced workflow (e.g., pre-processed queues for remittances and payments) or machine learning (e.g., enabling a cash applier to attach a customer number to a MICR). We also intend to provide a dashboard with data elements like automated match rate or MICR linkage percentage. .
Strengthen Partner Relationships
We want to strengthen partner relationships by providing transparency into our support operations, including daily file operations and data fails between our platform and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, and end-customer systems like Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and portals.
Our goal is to know where data operations stand and implement processes that autonomously fix those issues or escalate them for human intervention rapidly. Too many software vendors in our industry have lagged in this core area of usage and system support.
At Carixa, we are always seeking feedback on your challenges and would welcome your thoughts on how we can improve these investments for your needs. Please reach out to your Carixa Support Team with questions, comments or thoughts.
Learn more about our Accounts Receivable Automation Software
