The quote-to-cash process is the journey that begins the moment a buyer expresses intent to buy your product and ends in what’s the raison d’être (the most important reason) for every business – revenue.
Speed is crucial throughout the quote-to-cash lifecycle. The faster an organization can get pricing out, fulfill orders, and bill customers, the sooner it can move inventory and collect money to invest back into the business. However, the quote-to-cash process can prove challenging for those companies working with dated systems, email-based processes, and manual forms throughout.
These manual processes and inefficient hand-offs are inhibiting effective quote-to-cash execution. Manual data entry is still used to input key information from documents and forms, which is slow, expensive, and error-prone. There is a need to improve visibility and collaboration for stakeholders involved and better coordinate tasks across sales, contract, fulfilment, and finance teams. Organizations must look toward automation solutions to streamline process execution, ensuring the speed and accuracy of data intake and action across the critical quote-to-cash lifecycle.
Manual configuration of pricing and quoting
In simpler times when everything wasn’t that complicated and companies had few SKUs, manually configuring the product might work. However, given how diverse and complex the world is today, it is critical that sales organizations digitize their price lists and use automation to execute their operations. For example, when buying a desk today, there are so many options to choose from: interior and exterior, height, width, dining room, and office, number of seats, colours, and textures. The complexity that comes with more options can slow your sellers down from getting a quote back to your potential customer if the process isn’t automated.
Streamline the Approval Process
When approval processes take too long, it can result in lost sales opportunities. Customers may turn to competitors if they are forced to wait too long for approval, resulting in lost revenue for the company. Additionally, delayed approvals can slow down the sales cycle, leading to longer sales cycles and fewer closed deals.
A slow approval process can be frustrating for sales representatives, who may feel that their efforts are being hampered by bureaucracy. This can lead to decreased morale and motivation, resulting in lower productivity and decreased sales performance.
When the approval process is slow, it can lead to inefficiencies in the sales process. Sales representatives may spend more time following up on approvals rather than focusing on selling, which can slow down the sales cycle. This can result in missed sales opportunities, reduced revenue, and longer sales cycles.
Order Management Automation
Efficient quote-to-cash systems begin with effective order management tools. Implementing a customer relationship management (CRM) system along with an order management system (OMS) can help to ensure more accurate and up-to-date customer and order information. These two software systems can reduce the manual processes that lead to errors and delays. Furthermore, integrating these systems with a company-wide Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution enables businesses to leverage the same data throughout the entire QTC process for increased consistency.
Automate Order Fulfilment
Order fulfilment describes all the processes that a business uses to get goods into a customer’s hands after an order has been placed. Good order fulfilment can help to speed up deliveries and simplify the ordering process for customers, potentially securing a competitive advantage for the business. Various order fulfillment automation strategies exist. Most will rely on a combination of order fulfillment solutions that will perform essential tasks like invoice generation, inventory management, and carrier selection. Businesses that do not perform their own fulfillment in-house can still take advantage of automation by working with a third-party service provider that uses the right solutions. These are a few of the different approaches that businesses use to automate their order fulfillment processes.
Credit Management Automation
Automating the credit management process benefits both customers and lenders. It is much faster for customers to submit an online business loan application than to fill out and email a PDF form. Additionally, since it is not possible to submit an incomplete application (for example, by marking fields as “required”), online applications help reduce errors and processing time.
Business lenders also benefit from automated decision-making using credit scorecards. Using an automated decision engine to assess applicant creditworthiness is much faster than manually (and subjectively) assessing creditworthiness.
Invoice Automation
Having automated billing software that fits into your QTC process gives your sales teams direct access to your business’s catalogue of plans. With predefined products and pricing, they can pull the right information into their customer quote process, and then push that information through the billing system automatically.
The salesperson defines and prices the contract based on their plan offerings and any specific configurations discussed during their conversation with the customer.
Payment Automation or Billing Automation
Of course, the most obvious function of an automated billing platform is to, well…automate the billing process. Not only does automating the billing process reduces the possibility of human error, but it also significantly improves the customer experience.
Automated billing lets you:
- send accurate invoices to clients every time from the beginning
- sculpt customized coupons, discounts, etc. to meet the needs of larger accounts, and
- automate key billing-related communications to bolster the collections process.
Since “cash” is the final phase of the QTC process it’s important to have a means of continually collecting it that’s simple and straightforward for both parties.
Cash Application Automation
Once the customers’ payments are received, it’s time to process the payment and deposit the funds. For larger companies or businesses with high billing volume, the checkout application can be one of the most manual, time-consuming, and error-prone processes in the quote-to-pay process. Automating this function means that employees don’t have to try to match payments to invoices and miss customer payment dates. Basically helps in the no-touch cash application process.
Reporting Automation
The reporting phase of the quote-to-cash process involves generating analyses that reveal the company’s financial situation. It gives an overview of the company’s cash flow. Automated reporting tools provide actionable insights that reveal gaps and improve overall operational efficiency. Reporting tools must establish a link with ERP so that information flows smoothly throughout the company. Changing processes by removing boundary systems and focusing on the flow of key customer information throughout the company is key to operational efficiency.