BPM for Financial Operations: Order-to-Cash

Some people think the work is over when a sale is made. But if you own the “order-to-cash” process for your company’s finance department, it’s just beginning. Getting cash in the door is never as easy as it sounds to others. Careful oversight and management is required to ensure you hit your key metrics such as days of sales outstanding, bad debt percentage, and resource efficiency.

The difference between good metrics and bad metrics hinges on problem transactions that create “exceptions” to normal processes. It’s these exceptions - and all the manual work they generate - that eats up your staff’s time and prevents collections. How do you manage and keep control over exceptions? If you’re like most companies, printouts, spreadsheets, and e-mail are the primary methods. But that’s inefficient, makes it hard to understand the status of your exceptions at any point in time, and never provides the insight to help you understand what’s causing exceptions.

You can buy specialty software programs to help manage the order-to-cash process, but those won’t help with the myriad of other exceptions in other finance processes such as "purchase-to-pay" and "record-to-report". There are specialized software applications for those too, but if you go this route, you'll quickly find yourself in the challenging land of "application sprawl".

There is a better way. Appian’s Business Process Management (BPM) platform can easily be implemented – by your business users, without writing code – to create solutions for these order-to-cash processes tailored to your specific business needs. Integration with your ERP and other systems is a snap. Build applications for all the processes in the order-to-cash umbrella such as sales order quoting, deductions management, and credit processing and more with ease. You’ll be doing it with one application package. That’s only one screen for your users to log into (or better yet, use our new social and mobile interfaces). No longer will you have to wait for an independent software vendor with order-to-cash applications to put your change requests on their official roadmap. See a need to tweak your application? Simply open up the visual process modeler and implement it to go live immediately.

Want to learn more? See the customer examples below or fill out the form to speak to someone from Appian.