3 reasons to integrate Accounts Receivables and Enterprise Resource Planning systems

Guy Clack | Thursday, Apr 15th 2021
woman working on laptop with graphs and charts

Your business relies on efficient accounts receivable (AR) management to bring payments in quickly and smoothly. AR works best when it integrates seamlessly with connected business processes and shares a common data set with related systems. The enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is a significant case in point. It provides the data that financial accounting needs.

AR automation software helps your business in a range of ways including by:

  • automating manual AR tasks
  • improving visibility into invoicing status
  • predicting payer behaviour and identifying potential non-payment risks  
  • providing customisable dashboards for invoice and payment tracking and
  • meeting customer demands for digital ways of doing business.

It is designed to meet the needs of invoice processing by, amongst other things, building effective collection workflows and providing the means to help resolve disputes.

The ERP system holds the data AR needs. It therefore makes good business sense to integrate AR and ERP systems. That way, a single source of data truth informs all activities and businesses can:

  • Benefit from centralised information – integrating your AR platform with your ERP system ensures the data teams use is up to date. It removes the need for workaround processes sometimes put in place, such as exporting data from one system and putting it into a spreadsheet for another team to access
  • Better track and manage collections – if a payment is late, the AR platform notifies the relevant teams, identifying what escalation activity, if any, is needed. This saves teams the manual job of tracking payment status and working across systems for a complete picture
  • Send invoices by email automatically – the digital AR platform takes care of sending invoices to customers and following up. This saves time that can instead be put into other revenue-generating activities.

Manual ways of working and standalone systems that don't ‘talk' to each other make for slow, inefficient, and at times frustrating, AR processes. Automating AR and streamlining its activities through a centralised, digital platform can make for a better employee and customer experience of invoicing and reduced days sales outstanding (DSO).

Integrating AR and ERP systems helps reduce the time it takes to produce accurate invoices and issue them to customers. Additionally, it can cut down on the volume of invoice queries that may come back into the business and facilitate easier payments for customers, which improves business cash flow.

To find out more about digitising AR processes, take a look at YayPay by Quadient, an automated AR management platform.