Debit Orders Save Time

As a financial manager of a small to medium enterprise (SME), you may find yourself fulfilling multiple roles at once. You oversee salary payments, customer invoicing and debit order collections. You also analyse and report on business earnings, expenses and the financial well-being of the company. On top of all of this, you are also responsible for making key decisions about business investments and financial resource allocations.

It’s fair enough then that, on some days, you may wish there was more than one of you on your team. Duplicating yourself would help you get to things quicker and get them done more efficiently. The good news is that, in this day and age, you don’t necessarily have to clone yourself to optimise on work productivity.

Advances in modern technology are enabling the automation of many financial processes. This doesn’t mean that innovative technologies are going to put financial managers out of their jobs soon. What it does mean is that, by automating the more mundane aspects of your role, like data capturing, manual invoicing, chasing up payments, and the reconciliation of payment-related information, you should be freed up to focus on the more strategic side of your financial management responsibilities.

How Debit Orders Save Time:

Being in a cash-flow limbo is never ideal for business. According to the authors of the best-selling book, Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It…and Why the Rest Don’t, SMEs ideally need to get to the point in their cash conversion cycle, where they are bringing in more revenue than they are paying out. This is especially true for businesses that want to scale up.

One way to accelerate cash flow within a business is to automate processes like debit order collections, payments and invoicing.

• Automating debit order collections improves debit collection rates. Ideally, the software you use should also enable you to access your online collection records for easier data analysis and reporting. This way, debit orders save time.
• When it comes to automating customer payments, existing products allow you to receive payments from clients through bank EFTs, credit cards or direct cash payments. By providing customers with multiple, safe and easy payment options, they have fewer excuses for not paying you on time.
• Gone are the days of manual invoicing systems. These are both time-consuming and inefficient when compared to newer technologies. Automated customer invoices are accessible to customers online, or by email or post. By providing customers with more than one option for receiving their invoices, and by automating the process, customers can receive their invoices sooner and have less of a proverbial leg to stand on should their payments be overdue.

The strategic side of financial processes automation

You should also be happy to learn that existing fintech further assists financial managers with automated risk reports, commercial and consumer credit checks, and the automatic reconciliation of payment-related information. With these functions taken care of, you are freed up to focus on improving cash flow, making wise investment decisions, correctly allocating financial resources and the likes.