Guest post by Angela Cummings, Product Manager at Tesorio

My background is in Accounting & Finance and I’ve worked at big enterprise companies like Ford and Honeywell, but I found my sweet spot while working at startups like HireVue and Spiff.

You wear many hats at a startup, and as an accounting manager I had a wide range of responsibilities including accounts receivable, full cash forecasting, commissions, payroll, month-end close duties, treasury, audits and more. With all that I was juggling, gaining back time anywhere was a big benefit, which is why automating collections with Tesorio was such a huge game-changer.

You Cannot Stop Feeding the Collections Engine

Collections is like a steam engine that you must keep feeding to keep it going. You must keep your communication going with customers who have bills outstanding. If you're not communicating with them constantly, your cash collections performance will suffer and you’ll see an appreciable difference in the responses and your ability to collect.

When I was responsible for accounts receivable, all of my time away from my desk involved me getting on my laptop in the morning and at night to keep feeding the AR engine. If I attended a conference or was busy with month-end, quarter-end or year-end close, I still needed to get those emails out or we might not hit our targets, our aging would increase, and more revenue would be trapped in AR.

That’s why Tesorio’s automated campaigns are amazing. It's always running. If I’m on vacation, it's running. At a fun team off-site? It's still running. I could still make sure the VIP customers got the white glove treatment and I never ran out of time to get through the entire list of email communications each week. Every customer who needed to get contacted about their past-due invoice each week was receiving the correct message, and I was able to use the extra time to focus on other priorities on my list while also bringing in cash faster.

Manual Collections Was a Rite of Passage

Managing and maintaining collections was an endless, tedious cycle of rinse and repeat. You have to keep sending those emails. As soon as you get through the list, it's Friday and you’re dreading that a new list will be staring at you again on Monday morning.

Creating the list each week is not automatic, is it a manual and tedious process of pulling reports and matching data and copying and pasting and then reviewing each line item and then more copying and pasting. As if creating the list wasn’t bad enough, the process of sending the emails is not great either. My ERP had templates I could edit, which is better than creating a new email each time, but the functionality was not as flexible as I wanted it to be. To bring in cash faster, I needed to be able to customize my emails at scale, be very consistent with it and make it a priority.

To highlight how undesirable this process is, the accounts receivable function was an initiation of sorts on our accounting team, and every new member of our team had the “opportunity” to do it when they were new hires. It was handed down to me when I was new, and you can bet it was the first thing I handed off to the next new person we added to the team. Fortunately for that person, we had Tesorio in place by that point.

Tesorio’s automated campaigns take away all of that tedious manual work and make collections a smooth, automated process and something you’re not anxious to get off your plate. It’s now interesting to open up Tesorio to see where things stand instead of something that I used to dread.

Automated Forecasting Provides the Focus and Accuracy to Hit Collections Targets

AR Forecasting was also an important part of my responsibilities. Setting that target for cash collections each month and quarter was incredibly manual and subject to errors. I was always looking for better ways to analyze performance in a quick and automated manner to help with this forecasting process. My CFO was holding me accountable to hit that collections target, and I’m wading through yet another slow, manual process of rerunning ERP reports and manipulating them in a spreadsheet every week (or daily in the last week of a month or quarter) and analyzing the data line by line.

Now that I am a Product Manager and have joined Tesorio to lead the Forecast team, I am excited to connect with our customers to help translate their pain points around AR and cash forecasting into solutions. When I saw the first version of AR Forecasting, my first thought was, “This is the automated version of what I was doing in Excel! I wish I would have had access to this back when I was still in Accounting!”

Automating AR forecasting with Tesorio would have lifted a weight off my shoulders. It would have given my team greater visibility into AR and the ability to track and analyze our collections efforts. It would have been easier for us to prioritize our work, clarify our strategy on who should follow up with whom and understand what is expected. In the end, it would have helped us be more unified as a team as we focus on the cash we could get in the door and the path to achieving our cash forecast target each month.

Are you ready to solve your accounting team’s pain points and collect cash faster? Request a Tesorio demo today.