Revenue Assurance Process (Order to Cash)

If your organisation’s processes are not robust, your Financial Director may be concerned about Revenue Assurance. Is your business billing everything you should and are you billing it on time?

Revenue Assurance Process (Order to Cash)

If your organisation’s processes are not robust, your Financial Director may be concerned about Revenue Assurance. Is your business billing everything you should and are you billing it on time?

Historically, monthly billing cycles comprise the day or days when all the billing for the month is completed. But are you really confident about your billing process? You might have multiple recurring invoices that need creating manually. In an ideal world, your billing controller will focus on ensuring everything is correct without any interference.

We believe monthly billing processes are archaic because they:

  • Negatively affecting cashflow
  • Cause month end bottle necks
  • Create too much admin for anyone involved in the billing process

Business Central can improve your billing processes

Automated recurring billing

Contracts are created or imported from a CRM system. Then monthly billing schedules are automated with the added benefit of revenue deferrals and accruals automated by the system, which reduces your month end procedures.

Project and job-based billing

By using the built-in jobs module in Business Central, project managers and finance have full visibility of unbilled projects, milestone billing and completed projects ready for billing. The system will filter all the work ready for billing giving full visibility of what has and hasn’t been invoiced.

Expense Management

Relevant expenses can be tagged or recharged to clients or projects. No trawling through general ledger (GL) codes or expense claims to calculated recharges.

Order to Cash

Most organisations run a CRM system to varying degrees, and most will get as far as creating a Sales Quote, and once that is accepted, a Sales Order.

This process can be handed over to Business Central at any stage, which will vary by organisation. 2 typical processes we often see in our clients:

i) Basic Sales Process

The CRM system can handover the process to Business Central at either the quote stage or the Confirmed Sales Order stage. Data can flow both ways using out of the box functionality to update both critical systems where required.

Revenue Assurance Process (Order to Cash)
Revenue Assurance Process (Order to Cash)

ii) Contract to Blanket Sales Orders

Often companies will contract for services to be delivered over a period of time. In this case, you will be issued with a Blanket Purchase Order that may be called off over a number of months. This is where Business Central Blanket Sales Order functionality comes into play.

Business Central will automate the process of converting Sales Quotes to Sales Orders and pushing them through any required approval workflow as needed. Your finance team will have full visibility of invoiced and un-invoiced sales orders via a handy dashboard on the home page. Your team can also view the status of blanket sales orders that have been called off, and notifications will be sent when such orders are nearing completion, allowing the sales team to re-negotiate new orders and contracts as needed.

The focus remains on reducing month end processes:

  • Where possible, billing should take place daily
  • Invoices are deferred and released at source to reduce the month end manual invoice review and the need for complex spreadsheets
  • Invoices can be accrued via the system if using recurring billing or the job/project
    functionality
  • Full visibility of un-invoiced sales orders will allow a quick review of any additional revenue accruals at month end

In addition:

  • Cashflow is boosted as billing happens upon completion, rather than month end, which should theoretically improve Order to Cash by 15 days
  • Reduced risk of error as the system creates billing reminders and even invoices on the correct days
  • Finance department effort can focus on pro-active work that makes a difference such as credit control rather than any admin heavy tasks like raising manual invoices