Simplifying AR Automation with Sage Intacct

Skye Duhon:
Hi everyone. As Gage mentioned, I'm Skye Duhon. I am one of the leaders of our EisnerAmper Sage Intacct practice, and I've been with the firm for about 19 years and just love working with our clients, identifying ways to optimize the use of Intacct, such as AR automation.

Gage Ulrich:
Thanks, Skye. And I'm especially excited today because we are joined by two very special guests and it's a new one for us, but we are actually joined with two members from the Sage team personally. So here I'm joined today by David Fryoff, who is a senior solutions engineer for the Sage AR automation. And he is also joined by his colleague, Eric Olguin, who is an account executive on the AR automation team. Take it away, Eric.

Eric Olguin:
Thank you, Gage. So today we're going to discuss how organizations can modernize the invoice to cash process, especially as AR teams are being asked to manage more invoices, more customers, and more complexity without adding resources at the same pace. So here's what we're going to cover today. First, we'll discuss why traditional AR processes are becoming harder to sustain as businesses grow and customer expectations change. Next, we'll introduce a simple framework for evaluating your AR strategy and identifying opportunities for improvement. We'll then focus on one of the biggest challenges AR teams face today, time, specifically where time is being lost and how automation, self-service, and improved activity management can help reclaim it. Our goal is simple. We'd like everyone to leave today with at least one idea they can take back and apply within their own organization.

So let's start with a simple question. Why does accounts receivable need to evolve? For many organizations, AR processes were built years ago. When invoice volumes were lower, customer expectations were different and teams relied heavily on a manual process. As businesses grow, AR teams are expected to manage more accounts, more invoices, and more collections activity, often without additional headcount. Eventually, what once worked well becomes a bottleneck. So before we talk about technology, let's first understand the cost of managing accounts receivable and why modernization has become such an important topic. Accounts receivable exists because a business chooses to extend credit to customers. That decision may help drive sales and strengthen customer relationships, but it also creates costs. Most organizations think about the cost of waiting to get paid, but there are several additional costs that go unnoticed. There's time spent sending invoices, following up with customers, researching questions, resolving disputes, applying payments and managing exceptions.

As invoice volume grows, those costs tend to grow along with it. The key takeaway here is that AR should be managed deliberately, just like any other business function. The goal isn't simply collecting late invoices. The goal is creating a scalable process that supports cash flow, customer relationships, and growth. Once we view AR as something that can be intentionally managed, the next question becomes what should our AR strategy look like?

A successful AR strategy doesn't start with software. It starts by understanding what you're trying to achieve as a business, evaluating current performance and identifying what needs to change. One simple framework that's useful for this discussion is what we call the KFC framework. KFC stands for three simple ideas, know what you want, figure out what you're getting and change what you're doing. First, know what you want. Are you trying to accelerate cash flow, reduce collection costs, improve customer experience or grow without adding staff? Second, figure out what you're actually getting. Look at performance metrics, customer payment behavior, and how much manual effort is involved in daily processes. This usually highlights a gap between what the business wants and what's actually happening. Finally, change what you're doing, adjust policies, workflows, communications, and technology until outcomes begin moving in the right direction. The beauty of this framework is in its simplicity.

AR strategy shouldn't be a one-time exercise. It should be an ongoing cycle of measuring, learning and improving.

Everything starts with defining success. For some organizations, success means accelerating cash collections. For others, it may mean reducing the cost to collect, improving forecasting accuracy, supporting growth without adding staff or delivering a better customer experience. Those objectives will determine where automation makes sense and where human involvement remains important. For example, routine invoice reminders may be ideal for automation while high value strategic accounts may still require a personalized approach. There isn't one AR strategy that's right for every organization. The right strategy reflects your business goals, customer relationships, margins, and growth plans. Once objectives are clear, we need to understand how customers actually pay. Most organizations establish payment terms, but terms alone don't determine payment timing. Customers often pay based on their own AP processes, approval workflows, internal payment schedules, and purchasing requirements. That's why two customers with identical payment terms may consistently pay on very different timelines.

When AR teams don't understand those behaviors, they often become reactive and solely focused on invoices after they become overdue. Organizations that understand payment behavior can prioritize more effectively, set realistic expectations and communicate with customers in a much more strategic way. Payment terms establish expectations, but customer behavior often determines actual payment timing.

Once we understand payment behavior, we can look at the broader factors that influence our AR strategy. Things like cash flow requirements, profit margins, competitive pressures, customer relationships, invoice volume, industry expectations, and regulatory requirements all play a role. Collecting from a small business can look very different from collecting from a large enterprise. Likewise, a business operating on thin margins may have very different goals than a company focused primarily on growth. The purpose of this exercise isn't to create the perfect answer overnight. It's simply recognizing that your AR strategy should be designed around the realities of your business rather than a one size fits all process.

Those realities ultimately need to be reflected in defined credit policy. A strong credit policy answers important questions such as who receives credit? How do we determine credit worthiness? What credit limits are appropriate? When should additional orders be restricted? When do early payment incentives or penalties make sense? Having these rules documented creates consistency across the organization. It helps sales, finance and AR align around how credit decisions are made and reduces risk created by exception-based decision making. Many organizations support this process with a formal credit application, helping standardize how new customers are evaluated before credit is extended.

So let's pull everything together. Accounts receivable is a cost that should be actively managed. To manage it effectively, organizations need clear business objectives. They understand customer payment behavior, they need to understand to measure performance, and they need to evaluate how credit is being offered and managed. Some businesses will prioritize faster collections. Others may focus on reducing costs, improving data quality, supporting growth, or strengthening customer relationships. The important thing is identifying the outcomes that matter most and then designing AR processes around those objectives. Before we continue, we'd like to get a quick sense of where everyone is today. So this is a poll question and it's just how many or how are you currently managing collections? So here, I'll give you guys about 20 seconds to put in your answers and then we'll move on.

All right, so just a few more seconds. Awesome. So it looks like majority is Outlook, Excel, and manual process, which is something that we do see a lot followed by custom solution and then other collections or automation solutions. So I do want to thank everyone. This is helpful context and you will likely hear several of those challenges reflected in what we discuss next. So now that we've discussed AR strategy, let's shift from strategy to execution. One challenge consistently comes up regardless of industry, company size or AR maturity level, and that's time. Many AR teams understand what they would like to improve, but a huge portion of their day is consumed by activities that don't directly advance collections. Let's take a closer look.

Even though the ERP serves as the system of record, much of the actual collections process still happens outside of the ERP. Follow-up activity may be tracked in spreadsheets. Customer communication often lives inside individual inboxes. Notes may exist in personal files or manual trackers. This creates three major challenges. First, inconsistency. Second, lack of visibility. And third, difficulty scaling as volume increases. This isn't a people problem, it's a process problem. Most AR teams are working incredibly hard, but they're spending too much time organizing work instead of executing high value collections activities. When we examine the collection process at the invoice level, the challenge becomes even clearer. Every invoice requires work, sending it, tracking it, following up, answering questions, locating supporting documentation, and potentially making phone calls. Individually, these activities may only take a few minutes, but across thousands of invoices, those minutes become a significant capacity constraint.

As a result, AR professionals spend valuable time on routine administrative tasks rather than focusing on high value accounts, disputes, or opportunities to accelerate cash flow. The opportunity is to reduce the routine effort associated with each invoice and redirect that time towards more strategic activities.

When we take a step back and look at the bigger picture, many AR challenges come down to one thing, and again, that is time. That's the time spent delivering invoices, time spent responding to questions, time spent researching documentation, time spent resolving disputes, and time spent pursuing payments. Every delay extends the gap between the payment between the sale and the payment, and every minute spent on low value administrative work is a minute that can be spent accelerating cash or supporting important customer relationships. So one of the most expective ways to prioritize AR improvements is to simply ask where are we losing time and can that activity be automated, simplified, or shifted to self-service? The goal isn't to do more work. The goal is to reclaim time and redirect that work that delivers the greatest business impact. So throughout the first section, we've discussed the importance of defining clear AR objectives, understanding customer behavior, and identifying where time is being lost throughout the collections process.

The next question becomes how do organizations actually solve those challenges? That's exactly what David is going to walk us through next as he covers the practical tactics and automation strategies that help modern AR teams to scale more efficiently. With that, David, I'll hand it over to you.

David Fryauff:
All right, great. Thanks, Eric. So modern AR performance is driven by a set of practical tactics that focus on reducing manual efforts and improving consistency. These include minimizing non-collection time by eliminating routine inquiries, reducing manual time per invoice through standardized workflows, automated customer communications. This ensures timely and consistent outreach, enabling customer self-service for invoices and payments and managing collection activities through prioritized work lists. Together, these tactics address the most common sources of inefficiency in AR operations. Importantly, they're not about remaining the human element or removing the human element, but about supporting it with structure and automation. When applied thoughtfully, these tactics allow AR teams to handle higher volumes, improve customer experience, and deliver better cash outcomes without increasing workload. These also provide a bridge between strategy and execution, translating high level objectives into daily actions.

Reactive AR focuses on overdue invoices and manual reminders. Often after cash flow, pressure has already been emerged. Proactive AR, by contrast, uses data automation and visibility to identify risk early and guide action before issues escalate. This shift enables teams to prioritize accounts based on likelihood of payment and impact rather than simply age. Proactive AR improves outcomes without increasing efforts as automation handles like routine tasks and surfaces the next best action for collectors. Making this transition requires both mindset and capability changes, but the payoff is significant, more predictable cash flow, improved customer relationships and reduced operational stress. Proactive AR represents a more resilient and scalable approach to collections in a dynamic business development.

So we'll go ahead and do our second poll. Is automation a priority for your organization in the coming year? So again, we'll give it about 20 seconds or so for everybody to answer. All right, let's go ahead and look at the results. It looks like 48.5% says, yes, we are prioritizing AR automation and 27% says that we're going to prioritize other backend processes like payroll, tax, expense management, et cetera, and about 24%, they have no priorities. So let's dive into more into evaluating AR automation solutions. The critical success factor to improving collections is to reach as many customers as often as possible. However, if you're still using paper or relying on manual email to send or follow ups on open invoices, you're consistently running low on time. Email automation is a way to tackle that challenge of improving collections without investing in additional headcount. One of the fastest way to reclaim time in accounts receivable is to automate communications.

Most AR teams are still living in email, individual inboxes, spreadsheets, and ad hoc follow-ups like we saw in the previous poll. That's where consistently breaks down and efforts explodes. When we move AR out of email and into automated communication model, a few important things happen right away. First, invoices get to customers faster. There's no waiting for someone to manually send or resend an invoice. It's automatic and consistent from day one. Secondly, follow-up efforts drop domestically. Instead of collectors spending hours deciding on who to email and what to say, the system handles routine reminders automatically based on timing and roles you define. Third, we clean up data and centralize communication. Every message, statement, reminders, responses live in one place. This means that any agent can step in, nothing gets lost, and managers finally have visibility into what's happening, and maybe most importantly, communication becomes standardized. Customers receive a consistent professional message as invoices age, regardless of which collector is assigned.

The goal here isn't to remove people from the process, it's to remove unnecessarily manual work so your AR team can focus on exceptions, relationships, and high value accounts instead of chasing inboxes.

In our comparative analysis of company's pre and post-automation implementation, companies not using automation had an average days delinquent of 39 days. Once automation was implemented, that average days delinquent dropped to 18, that's a 53% improvement. Once communications are automated, the next big level is customer self-service, letting customers help themselves instead of defaulting to your AR team. A huge percentage of AR time is consumed by routine questions like, "Can you resend the invoice? What's my balance? Can I get a statement?" None of these actually move cash, they just consume capacity. When self-service is done right, customers can access what they need on their own terms. They can view invoices and statements directly from automated emails without logging tickets or waiting for responses. This alone eliminates large volume of inbound inquiries and gives you something AR teams rarely have, proof of delivery and engagement. Most importantly, self-service allows customers to pay directly, whether it's ACH or credit card, it removes that friction.

Removing that friction shortens the time between invoice received and payment made. The result is fewer interruptions for your team, faster resolution for customers, and a better performance across every AR metric like DSO or day sales outstanding, cost to collect and customer experience. The goal isn't to reduce service, it's to deliver it in a way that scales. Other factors of how customer self-service reduces past due and average days delinquent is that the customer has immediate access to information they need to pay, such as POs, statements, missing invoices, taking as many bears out of the way for customers to pay, you have a significant impact as shown on the data. From what we heard from our AR community was that the fact that paper checks increase past due and average days delinquent. So we examine that. In particular, we examine the impact of accepting payments online. You can see the impact of online payments by a drop of 14 days in that average days delinquent and an 8% drop in past due.

Even with automation and self-service, there's still a critical role for people in accounts receivable, especially in high value relationship driven environments. The problem is that most of the human work today is fragmented, calls, notes, follow-ups, promise to pays, they live in inboxes and spreadsheets and someone's memory that makes effort hard to measure and almost impossible to manage at scale. Collections activity management is about centralizing the human touch instead of eliminating it. When activities live in one place, every action is visible, calls made, email set, disputes logged, promise tracked. This alone changes behavior because work becomes measurable and repeatable instead of reactive. It also allows you to automate around human effort. Agents don't waste time deciding what to do next. The system can surface that next best action for them, apply templates and reduce manual steps so each interaction takes less time. The result is consistency without rigidity.

Collectors still apply judgment and relationship knowledge, but they're supported by structure, prioritization and visibility. This is how AR teams scale without burning out their people by automating the workflow around the human touch, not replacing it.

This graph shows the impact of automation centric collection processes compared to that manual process. Most importantly, you can see in that 40 to 60% manual activities yields the best results. So in other words, not fully automated, not fully manual, but that sweet spot where it's a combination of the two is where we see the least past due and the biggest reduction in it. Okay, we're going ahead and go to our third poll. What is your biggest priority in improving your collections process? I'll give everybody about 20 seconds to answer it. Okay, so results are 30%. Actually, it's pretty close. So 30% freeing up staff time, another 30% increasing your cash flow, about 20% in cost savings and 20% in visibility into invoices and payments.

So let's go ahead and dive into a demo of Sage Automation. So typically, as we've talked about in throughout the PowerPoint presentation that in that manual process, people are working off that aging spreadsheet, having to go into Intacct to hook up that customer information to the email, send the email, and then back to that spreadsheet to add that note. So we're able to help automate that process. And the nice thing is also is you have the ability to take your customers and bring them up into different groups or segments to have that different control message to. So for example, you might use the best practice that comes with the system for majority of customers and then create a white glove segment for those you want to do more handholding with that you don't necessarily want to send the automated email to, instead you want to create a task for the user to reach out.

Then each of these segments or credit classes have a set of steps on them. So these steps are what help the team be more proactive. For example, we've got a invoice presentment step that can generate with that link to the portal for your customers to get on and pay, as well as we have a friendly coming due reminder and then those past due reminders, again, allowing the system to do the heavy lifting for the team so that they can focus on the customers that they need to focus on. You also get to have control over how these steps generate. So for example, the first reminder here, for this to generate the balance of the invoice has to be grade zero, total age also has to be grade zero. It's got at least seven days past due, doesn't have a promise to pay and it's not in dispute.

That way the customer doesn't promise to pay an invoice or dispute invoice and receive an automated email about that same invoice a couple of days later. And this is also changeable. So if you want to start at say 15 days instead of seven, that's an easy change that can be made, as well as we can create some custom steps on that automation.

You also control how often you want the system to reach out to your customers and it is scheduled so it runs on its own. So again, no need for somebody to come in and generate that automation, allowing them to focus on the customers that they need to focus on. So next we'll go ahead and we'll go into account detail for customer. So typically in that manual process, and I kind of talked about this in my part of the PowerPoint presentation, is that everything is either living in somebody's email or in somebody's head. And so it's really tough to be able to see everything about that account in one spot. So we have to be able to give that visibility where you can see all the open transactions for this customer, how they typically pay, in this case they're paid 10 days late, as well as all the activities are done against the account.

I know that in working in Excel spreadsheets to try to look through Excel and Excel spreadsheet to figure out what was done against that account can be grueling to be able to do. We also take it one step further in the fact that when an activity is created, whether it's being done by the automation or by the user, an invoice or group of invoices typically tagged to that activity. So that gives you up not only at the customer level, but also at that individual invoice level of all the different times you reach out to the customer about that specific invoice. And you can easily hover over to view the email or the notes from the phone call is made, or you click on view details to open up That activity.

And so in here, we have an email that was sent out to Kennedy Corporation. Inside the email is our view statement button. This is our link to our self-service portal. It's essentially a single sign on link, so there's no need for your customers to have to remember using a password, nor do they have sign up for anything. All they really have to do is just receive an email out of the system, contain that link. So it does help with the adoption of your customers to that portal. So we'll go ahead and open up that self-service portal. So we mentioned in the PowerPoint that one of the other things that the AR team usually faces is having to send that copy of the invoice. And so this helps to take that out of it where the customer can actually just come into the portal, they can select an invoice or a group of invoices.

They can easily download PDF copy right here, as well as they can make that payment. They can pay by credit card or ACH. They can save that payment information for future use, as well as they can enroll in auto pay, which automatically pay their invoices on the due date or a specific day of the month. And then those payments are automatically posted back into Intacct.

We also have the way to do surcharging around the credit card piece if you want to pass that fee along. They can also send a message to the collector. They can easily dispute invoice right on the portal, select that reason code, add that message, uploading sporting docs and submit it. Our reason codes are completely customizable and you get as many as you need and you can have a small set for the customer to choose from and a broader set for the team to choose from as well. Or if you don't get very many disputes, you can turn this functionality off. And they can also do that promise to pay. They can set that promise to pay date, add that message and submit it. Nice thing is in that manual process, this is tracked typically in somebody's calendar or maybe in that aging spreadsheet. They're having to go back into Intacct lookups you have to paid either way.

So this helps to prioritize that and the system will actually track it for the collector only with the collector if they break it. If they fulfill the promise to pay, then this is going to close the activity and collectors don't have to worry about it. So again, a little bit of time savings there for that collector. And then they can take this grid and they can export to Excel. There's also no need to reach out to the team about historically closed invoices. They can easily see those here as well as payments made. And these are all payments made, not just payments made in the portal. So if you have a customer who still pays by check or maybe a direct bank to bank ACH, those enter as a cash receipt inside of Intacct, those sync in and show up on our portal as well. They can also see a history of messages with the collector, that collects profile, as well as any documents you might want to upload for them.

So let's go back into Sarah and get into the day in life of the collector. As we talked about through that power presentation, that individual collector again is working out of those multiple different systems. So instead of working out of those three, sometimes four different systems, we can take that, we can centralize that all into one spot for that collector. So when that collector logs in the morning, they can easily see how they're doing this month. They've got their next best activity. That's equivalent to aging spreadsheet, but this is based upon the automation. So management gets to control what shows up in this list as well as what order it shows up in. That way the team is working as efficiently as possible. And then they have their messages section here. This essentially is a calendar in their email. So this is where they can see any followups they have due today or past due any unread emails as well as any of those broken promises.

And then they can just click the first one to work the first one on their list. And before they make a phone call or send an email, they click a dropdown here to be able to easily get that customer information so they can see basic credit information, including our SERA credit score, which is based upon five different parameters you choose from, you wait to essentially create this scale over here. So this essentially becomes an internal credit score, just another way of you being able to evaluate how your customers pay you.

They can also see historical trends, so averages late information, if there has been any broker promises or disputes in the last two years, as well as that current aging. You can also view contact information and confirm that we do have the ability to do a hierarchy around contacts. So let's say you wanted to email the primary contact for the first two notices, if you wanted to escalate to additional contacts, we can do that escalation. And then you can also view transactional information. So payments made against the account as well as all the open invoices on that account. And they can see if the customer's access to self-service portal. I always like to highlight this because if using is a habit of checking this before they make that phone call or send that email and to find the customer hasn't accessed it in a while or at all and talked up with the customer, we find that that does help with the adoption.

If they are making that phone call, they click on the view contacts, select the contact, add it to a note and then be able to add their notes below that. If they do need to follow up with that email, then come to the email tab here, they can select from a predefined template or fill out the email themselves. They come attachments tab here and easy attach the PF copy of the invoice the customer might need. No need to go into Intacct to download it as well as they can attach a report like a statement or if they do need to, they can browse an attachment from the computer as well. They can enter in that promise pay information here on behalf of the customer and the customer does break it. The system will follow the actual part down here, mark as broken. If they made a partial payment, give the amount to pay and the date they paid it.

Or if they paid nothing, it'd be a blank like it is here. And again, it's going to let that collector here of that broken promise. And then they also can schedule the follow-ups for themselves. The nice thing is the system is smart and the fact that again, if the invoice gets paid before the follow-up date, then the system is going to close that follow-up and the activity because an emergency invoice been paid. So again, a little bit time savings there versus that manual process where again, this is tracked in somebody's calendar, they're having to go into intact to look up to make sure the invoice is still open either way. And then same thing with the list down here. The collector doesn't get through the list that day, sync runs, payments flow in, invoice associated with activity gets paid, activity falls off the list. That way it's always the most updated list for that collector, knowing that in that manual process, unfortunately that aging spreadsheet is definitely outdated the next day, if not even sometimes later that day.

So again, helping to make the team more efficient and helping to centralize everything into one spot for that collector.

So next, let's go ahead and get into reporting out of the system. So as our collections manager, it can sometimes be tough to track on different elements around accounts receivable. So this dashboard can provide a lot of that to that manager. They can view everything roll up as a whole as a manager, as well as they can drill down to see each individual user and how they're doing with the customer assigned to them. If multi-entity can view the dashboard by each individual entity as well. We see the basic information here, so current error balance, averages late information as well as that current DSO. We can also show cash projections. So we can show these projections using five different reasons. The one I like to highlight is this predicted payment value and what is we developed an algorithm that does machine learning that predicts when invoice been paid based upon how that customer pays you.

So for example, if the invoice was due on the 10th and the customer's be paid 15 days late, then that predated date would be the 25th. So it helps to take the educated guesswork out of those cash projections and rate based upon the customer's payment history. It also takes into consideration that say they might have a monthly invoice and then maybe once a year they have renewal where they have a much larger invoice, it takes them longer to pay that larger invoice. It does take that into consideration as well. And then also looks at promise to pays and then expect to pay, which is where the collector expects the customer to pay, but has officially got promise to pay yet, but still wants to be able to track it. Then also the due date. And it does show it being unresolved and that's when it's past its due date and past its predicted date, but does not yet have a promise to pay or expect to pay against it.

The nice thing is everything is also durable. So you could drill down to see what invoices make up those projections. And then this graph can also be viewed by week.

You can also see that team activity. I know in that manual process, it can be really tough to track how that team's doing. So you can easily see how the team's doing as a whole, as well as each individual collector. You can see it in a wide variety of different ranges, including a custom date range and it's refreshable so it's real time data as well. Then you can also see self-service usage, current aging, average is late information, who those top customers are, as well as the average delay trend and prior six month DSO trend. So again, providing the management with everything they need to be able to analyze their accounts receivable.

Then we also have more detailed reporting as well. For example, we've got a all accounts view, our customer hub where you could view everything about your customers. You could filter off of the customer's oldest invoice. So let's say you want to see invoices that customers with an invoice that's at least 60 days past due, you can easily see that. And including this aging also includes last payment information, primary contact, last activity information, averages to pay that internal credit score. So really a risk review of that customer or group of customers and everything is also can be turned to what we call an alert, which will send you an email with a spreadsheet attached containments in that view. And the view is customizable. So you can drag and drop comms, you can hide comms, you can rename them so that they're exactly or you need them to be in for that specific reports.

All right, that's usually what I show in my demo. So I'll go ahead and stop sharing my screen and we'll go back to the PowerPoint. I think we're going to open it up to Q&A.

Gage Ulrich:
All right. Yeah. Thanks David. We do have a couple questions and one of them is coming in. Let's say we do choose to go with AR automation from Sage. Do you scope implementation for that and is there a post-implementation training and support available?

David Fryauff:
Yeah. So we do scope it ahead of time and provide that statement of work that's going to help both the client and the implementation team to know what to implement at that point. As well as once you go through implementation, post-implementation, you are assigned a customer success manager that will help with any post-implementation, maybe training or any changes to the automation that might be needed.

Gage Ulrich:
Thank you. And just had another one come in as well. Is this a standard offering or an add-on?

David Fryauff:
So this would be a add-on, but it is a core Sage product. So we do have a sync with Intacct, but it's outside of Intacct. It would just be another module you would add onto your Intacct license.

Gage Ulrich:
Great. Perfect. And what about if you have different customer segments? Can you have different messages based off those customer segments?

David Fryauff:
Yep. And I kind of talked about that in the very beginning of my demo, but you do have the ability to take your customers and bring them up into those different segments to have a different control message too. The example I gave in my demo was you could utilize the best practice for majority of customers and then create that white gloves segment for those strategic customers that you want to do more handholding with and not necessarily not send an automated email to.

Gage Ulrich:
Great, great, great. Oh, had another one come in. So do customers ever struggle getting their customers to pay online?

David Fryauff:
We actually saw a huge uptick in online portal around COVID time and post - COVID. And one thing we see that the uptick also is the fact that with our login, it's a single sign on, so they don't have to remember that username and password. They don't have to sign up for anything. So the ease of adoption really does help with that making of the online payment. I don't know if you want to add anything to that, Eric. Sorry. I've been answering all the questions. I was trying to give Eric a chance to add anything if he wanted to.

Eric Olguin:
No, no, you're fine. Yeah, you did a good job.

David Fryauff:
Sorry.

Gage Ulrich:
Yeah. If there's anybody else that has questions, feel free to submit them at any time, but I do have a question for the group or whoever really wants to answer it, but what are some of the biggest piece of advice you would say for anyone who's looking to bring automation to their AR processes?

David Fryauff:
I'll get my thoughts on it and then Eric, you can go ahead and give your thoughts on it too. I think one of my thoughts is to make sure looking at the package that you have complete package. So we do see that there's other automation in the segment where they'll automate the email, they might have a self-service portal, but when the collector does actually need to reach out, they don't have much in that activity management and that collector still typically having to work off that aging spreadsheet. So having that complete package, I think is one of the biggest things to look for is to make sure that all three of those things exist, the automation, the self-service portal, and then that activity management. Eric, I don't know if you have anything else, any other suggestions?

Eric Olguin:
To echo off what David said, I think really just taking a deep dive into your own current AR process and see where the pitfalls are or the roadblocks. So are you currently sending out a lot of messages manually that could be automated or are you struggling having your customers make payments in one section or would a portal be beneficial to your customers to give them that one stop shop to view invoices and statements without having to reach out to someone on the collections team? All those things add up to taking up a lot of time that can be automated at the end of the day.

Gage Ulrich:
Great answer guys. I do have another one that came through. So can you talk a little bit more about the intercompany receivables and what are some of the best practices you have seen with current customers of this automation?

David Fryauff:
So that is typically, from what I've seen, that is typically handled just within Intacct or either adding that intercompany as an actual customer and giving them that capability to view things online and reminders. But majority of the time that's the exception, majority of the time it's just handled within Intacct and it's not necessarily brought into our system at that point unless you're adding them as a client.

Gage Ulrich:
Okay. Gotcha. Thank you. Now I'll do a last call for questions. Sky, is there anything you'd like to add in? We can't hear you, Sky, if you're talking.

Skye Duhon:
Can you hear me now?

Gage Ulrich:
Yes, we can.

Skye Duhon:
Okay, great. I said no. I think they did a great job of illustrating the tool. So my just two cents would be if you are interested in adding this or want to look at automating AR, just make sure to reach out and see how we can help you guys. Yeah, perfect. I see one more question came through, Gage.

Gage Ulrich:
Yeah, I do see that. So is it possible to automate the sending of the invoice where the customer wants the invoice submitted through their portal?

David Fryauff:
It kind of depends on how they want to. So we've seen it where they want to email to the portal and that we can do, we can select certain email addresses, just resentment only email address. So you're sending the portal for that to get the invoice in there, but then maybe you reach out to somebody else for the actual reminders. But a lot of times it ends up being that you're having to just upload it to the portal, not necessarily via email. And that part, unfortunately, we don't have automation around the actual upload of the invoice. What we can do is we can utilize reason codes to say that it's been presented and the reminder collector in their activity management, they need to go check it to see if it's been accepted or marked for payment and then create that promise to pay. So we can kind of help automate to keep track of that invoice through that life cycle, but unfortunately we can't automate the actual upload of the invoice if you're having to physically upload it to their portal versus emailing it in.

Gage Ulrich:
All right. Thank you. And with that, I just wanted to kind of throw this slide back on here again. As Skye mentioned, if you have any questions at all, feel free to reach out to any of us and we'd be sure to make sure you get that question answered. Or if you want to maybe explore Sage Intacct, what is Sage Intacct? You can reach out to any of us or if you want to look at maybe your Intacct customer already and you want to look at bringing on this AR automation, we're here to help you. So thank you so much for joining today.

_{Transcribed by Rev.comAI}