Seismic Replaces Manual Invoicing With Tesorio, Boosting Its AR Capacity, and Saving Bandwidth Avoiding an Internal System Build
Results with Tesorio include:
Completely eliminating multiple, time-consuming manual steps from its invoicing process
Adding a human element to dunning campaigns to foster stronger customer relationships
Gaining more real-time data integration with NetSuite for increased data visibility and push
Seismic is among a growing list of companies that rely on a business systems team dedicated specifically to the finance and accounting department to help relieve process pain points through automating technology. As Manager of Financial Systems at Seismic, Gabriel Medina was hired to lead the finance business systems team for this SaaS-based sales enablement platform. “Our goal is to try to automate and make the life of the finance and accounting department as easy as we can,” he explains.
Gabriel’s team takes a consultative approach while performing three primary roles for its internal team:
Maintaining and supporting all the systems within its finance tech stack
Identifying and implementing new systems for increased capacity and/or better integrations
Assessing end-to-end processes and finding ways to streamline them through automation
Manual Constraints Severely Limited AR Capacity
When Gabriel arrived at Seismic in 2021, the AR team was struggling with a very bulky, mostly manual process that on a daily basis significantly limited how many invoices could be processed and how many dunning emails could be generated and sent to customers. This posed a significant problem for a company that was growing organically at a rapid clip.
The AR staff had previously attempted to streamline their process by using some email templates. Even so, every time they needed to generate an initial invoicing message or a follow-up dunning message to a customer, they had to copy and paste the appropriate template into an Outlook email, which also had to be manually addressed to the customer contact. From there, they switched back to Excel to manually download the customer invoice and attach it to the email.
On top of that, they had to manually input the invoice number into NetSuite after it was sent and type any other updates related to the customer’s billing and payment status as they occurred. These updates were captured in a downloaded AR report that the team manually reviewed to identify follow-up tasks and appropriate dates for them.
Business Systems Team Assesses the Situation and Seeks Solution
To begin addressing this problem, Gabriel dug into the invoicing and dunning process to gain a better understanding of where things were breaking down or being unnecessarily slowed. Once he identified the pain points, he translated them into system requirements and considered three different solution avenues:
Using available functionality in an existing system in their tech stack
Building their own automated solution for AR invoicing and dunning
Selecting a best-of-breed AR automated solution
Although the first option was a possibility that would have provided better reporting than they currently had, it still had limitations. Gabriel and his team had the know-how for the second option, but it would take a significant amount of time and require pulling resources from other critical projects and responsibilities.
That left the third option, which led him to demo Tesorio’s AR platform. “One of the huge things that stood out to me about Tesorio was the super simple workflow of it,” Gabriel says. For example, “you could go down a row and tag information or create notes for individual customers or in bulk batches.” And even though he was looking at Tesorio to solve the invoicing and dunning process, he recognized that Tesorio’s automation and functionality could be used in additional ways to help the finance and accounting team.
Tesorio Is Up and Running in an “Insanely Quick Amount of Time”
Several other factors made Tesorio the most cost-effective solution with the best possible outcome, Gabriel notes. It could be implemented and in the hands of the AR team much faster than if they built their own system. The fact that Tesorio could provide more real-time data integration, visibility, and push than using NetSuite alone was a huge benefit.
Plus, the email templates the AR team previously used were “really robotic sounding.” Tesorio lets them easily customize and humanize emails when appropriate so that customers don’t feel like just a number, and Seismic can diplomatically get their attention about unpaid invoices.
AR Now Handles Growth From All Angles
According to Gabriel, one of the biggest wins the AR team has experienced with Tesorio is the ability to process significantly more invoices and dunning campaigns in a much shorter amount of time, which is critical for a company like Seismic that is in full growth mode. “We’ve grown organically in terms of transactions and sales, and AR has been able to handle that increase in volume,” he says.
Additionally, Seismic acquired a company, which significantly added to their high volume of transactions. With Tesorio, “we were also able to take on all this crazy new volume, while still freeing up some time for the resources dedicated to the AR process” to handle other tasks.
Seismic is now moving into the next phase of its Tesorio usage. “We initially took the AR process we had and we automated it with Tesorio,” says Gabriel. “Now, we’re leveraging some of the additional things we’ve found out that it can do and trying to make our process even better.” This includes things like:
Optimizing the escalations process by automatically getting more people involved when customers become very delinquent
Tagging customers that need a PO to avoid unnecessary payment roadblocks
“These are next-level things that our AR team never really had a way of doing before in any kind of systemic or efficient way,” he says.
