14 July 2015 | Technology

Cash is King

The faster you can move from customer order to cash in hand, the more efficient you’ll become and ultimately, the better you'll service your customers.

Distributors are keen to figure out how to get paid faster in order to achieve better cash flow management and free up capital to reinvest in the business.

Today, life moves faster than ever. It can be hard to keep up. The role of distributors is evolving. Technology is constantly innovating. And the pace of business is accelerating. But there’s one thing that remains constant – the fact that cash is king. It’s a fundamental principle. It doesn’t matter how great your business is, if you can’t manage cash flow effectively, you’ll struggle to keep your doors open.

Distributors and manufacturers are facing intense pressures to innovate. By finding better ways to do things, they can reduce operational costs, enhance company profitability, and maybe even pass on some of that savings to their customers. It’s a win-win. But it’s hard to keep finding the right areas to improve that generate high ROI. After all, how do you out-do yourself again and again?

One hot topic that’s making headlines is accelerating order-to-cash cycles. After all, the faster you can move from customer order to cash in hand, the more efficient you’ll become and ultimately, the better you’ll service your customers. But shaving days or even weeks off the average cycle is not an easy task, but once you shorten the time it takes to get paid, your business will thank you.

A great place to get started is eliminating manual order processing. Many are still processing the bulk of purchase orders by hand. This means manually printing customer purchase orders and processing each one individually by re-entering data as a sales order in your existing ERP system. Talk about inefficient! It’s slow, cumbersome, expensive, and prone to errors.

So why keep doing something that’s clearly not working? Processing mountains of paper is frustrating. Not to mention that manually re-keying orders adds zero customer value. Instead, consider switching to sales order automation software, which automatically transforms customer order data into a sales order in your existing ERP system with zero human interference.

Sales order automation makes life easier. It processes volumes of orders in minutes rather than hours or days. Conexiom is easy to set-up with as many unique customer order formats as you need. And it even works while you sleep. If that’s the kind of business improvement that sounds right to you, it’s time to explore sales order automation.