CREDIT MANAGEMENT JULY and August 2022

OPINION
AUTHOR – Andy Lilley
transforming, and visualising data, so your
teams can make more informed decisions
around credit risk policies, collection
strategies, or credit limit increases to create
greater value for the business. It can help
you gain visibility into customer behaviour
changes, which could unlock opportunities
for you to work with customers to solve
payment challenges, before they become
a major problem or increase their line of
credit and in turn your revenue. This in
turn can improve profitability by reducing
the financial risks posed by write-offs and
late payments.
Creating greater visibility over realtime
payments allows you to leave the war
of attrition over unpaid invoices behind.
This in turn leads to a more customercentric
approach to credit, collections and
complaints that can help you to maintain
good customer relationships.
RETAINING TALENT
In an increasingly competitive business
environment, the ability to attract and
retain top talent is crucial to business
success. A recent survey commissioned
by BlackLine suggests that one of the first
steps finance and accounting needs to take
to retain their best workers is to eliminate
transactional, mundane work. More than a
quarter (28 percent) of F&A professionals
surveyed said there weren’t opportunities
to learn new skills because transactional
work takes up so much time, while a similar
number (26 percent) claimed that they had
become bored of the mundane, repetitive
nature of their jobs. What’s more, a quarter
(26 percent) also claimed not to have time to
focus on future career development.
It’s clear that your talent wants to
spend their time adding value, regardless
of function. Completing a long list of
manual tasks, which could be automated,
is not adding value. If 80 percent of your
time is spent on routine tasks that can
be automated, that’s 80 percent of your
value gone before any major or strategic
tasks arise. This wasted energy wastes your
employees, which passes on up the chain.
Automation frees up F&A team members
to focus on strategic, more career-focused
goals, ensuring all of their motivation and
energy is spent bringing value to your
business (and not someone else’s).
MANUAL PROCESSES
Many organisations have now automated
processes such as accounts payable, but the
prevalence of manual processes in accounts
receivable continues to pose serious health
issues for businesses. The problem is that
automating some processes and not others
could ultimately cost you more than you
bargained for. If the budget only stretches
so far, it’s essential to upgrade the process
that will have the biggest impact. Let me
explain by way of an analogy.
Imagine you need to dig a hole
somewhere in your back garden. You could
do it with a shovel, but it needs to be a very
large hole, so doing it that way would take a
huge amount of time and exhausting effort.
So, you hire a JCB. This gets the job done
much faster and with much less effort. The
problem is, you didn’t know where exactly
to dig the hole to begin with and you’ve dug
it in the wrong place. Now, not only do you
still need to dig the hole, but you need to
repair the large area of back garden that is
now a building site.
Automating some F&A processes but
leaving AR up to manual processes creates
a similarly traumatic scenario. Choosing
to invest in accounts receivable opens
up a treasure trove of intelligence and
profitability that could make the difference
between success or failure. When it comes
to accounts receivable, investment is no
longer a nice-to-have, it is now a must-have
for survival.
Automating some F&A
processes but leaving AR
up to manual processes
creates a similarly
traumatic scenario.
Choosing to invest in
accounts receivable
opens up a treasure
trove of intelligence and
profitability that could
make the difference
between success or failure.
Andy Lilley is
Managing Director –
Global AR, BlackLine
Brave | Curious | Resilient / www.cicm.com / July & August 2022 / PAGE 14