Customer Portal Automation – Cashbook develop new tool

In the world of finance and accounting things are moving fast. Accounting processes, standards and ways of completing tasks are receiving updates more frequently. Especially in the current ‘innovation era’ and the increased advances in technology. New developments can have a large impact on your business. It may lead to financial staff spending more time on additional manual processes. Your company may need to hire people to complete these new tasks, or employees may leave due to the extra manual processes. Automation of manual financial processes is now a must for any large company. Savings of both time and resources are too big to ignore. Automation brings the additional benefits of employee job satisfaction and a decrease in staff turnover. Financial staff don’t enjoy completing repetitive manual processes that include a high risk of costly manual errors.

What are Customer Web Portals?

A recent shift in the Accounts Receivable process has seen a move to ‘customer web portals’ by big box retailers. Retailers such as Amazon and Walmart now direct their suppliers to retrieve their remittance information online. Previously, retailers would have sent remittances directly to suppliers in PDF, EDI, Excel or Email format. With customer web portals, there’s now an extra step for finance departments to manually retrieve remittances from the retailer’s web portal. This new manual process can be very laborious and time consuming for your finance department. Especially, if you have a lot of retailers that require you to complete this. Companies can have many individual portals and usernames/passwords, along with uncertain times of when remittances become available.

Customer Portal Automation

To solve this issue for our customers, Cashbook developed a customer portal automation tool. The tool itself automatically logs-in to each web portal with the username/password. It searches by date range, and then runs frequently in the background until remittances are made available. It automatically downloads them and creates a remittance batch in Cashbook. This whole process typically takes place overnight, and the remittance batch will be waiting for staff to process in the morning. The remittances can then be auto-matched against all your open invoices, the cash on your bank statements, and then afterwards updating of the General Ledger occurs.

This retrieval of remittance files from customer web portals has created a further step for finance departments, one which did not previously exist. Cashbook are seeing this change as the norm now with big box retailers. We expect the other retailers to follow their lead as this becomes a standard procedure. The Cashbook portal automation tool helps our clients save a huge amount of time compared to the manual method. The tool securely stores full log-in information leading to increased security. Particularly, if your organization operates a shared service centre for multiple business locations or regions. The portal automation tool builds up a huge library of big box retailer portal data. This information can then be used to further streamline the portal process going forward. Cashbook have automated another link in the chain to achieving industry-leading levels of Cash Application automation.

Contact Us

If you would like to discuss how Cashbook can automate the Customer Portal Process for your company, you can get in touch with our team. You can call us on +353 61 338 400 (international) or 630-352-2228 (North America). Alternatively, you can email info@cashbook.com to get more information. We are looking forward to showing you how Cashbook can help your company realize the benefits of cash application automation.