Your Order to Cash Needs a Brain

Every system that works well has a certain order to it. Form and function each have their place.

The central nervous system operating inside each of us may only consist of the brain and spinal cord, but the estimated 100 billion neurons snapping away within that brain gathers information from the entire body to coordinate all our organic activity.

Whatever form of computing equipment you’re using to read this missive is able to do the jobs called upon through the instructions and processing power provided by its central processing unit, or CPU. This circuitous ‘brain’ of the computer processes inputs, stores data and pumps out results.

For every company, maintaining efficient cash flow in support of ongoing operations is, clearly, important. Ensuring, and accelerating, the flow from capturing a customer order, delivering the goods or service to receipt of payment for that order - the process known as the order-to-cash cycle - needs a brain too.

OTC Needs More Than TLC

These business activities being managed from the sales order through to customer payment define not only your success as a company but the strength of your relationships with your customers. Order-to-cash is highly complex, and it will only become more complex as the move toward recurring revenue business models continues apace. 

Don’t leave this set of processes to chance. What this crucial set of functions requires is its own central nervous system, a CPU to call its own. The thinking person’s order-to-cash deserves a brain to run things.

OTC Must-Have Grocery List

Well, why can’t we just go with a homegrown solution or patchwork ERP build-out in response to order-to-cash technology needs, you ask?

A few reasons to reconsider that alternative:

1. Agility and adaptability should be the priority, given the variety of business models 
2. Think about volume even before you think about scale
3. A thorough understanding of the most complex variations of the recurring revenue model is a must

The brain itself is a complex organ that controls thought, memory, emotion, touch, motor skills, vision, breathing, temperature, hunger and every process regulating a person’s body.

The system overseeing your most critical financial processes must handle the same level - and variety - of complex functions and capabilities for your business.

And, lest we forget the wide swath of teams impacted by these activities, commentary from a Gartner conference this past summer serves as a nice reminder.

“CEOs and chief sales officers recognize that functional silos handing off clients from one function to the other, and using different technologies, people and processes, are a barrier to revenue growth,” said Doug Bushée, a senior director analyst for Gartner at the firm’s CSO & Sales Leader Conference in May 2021. “As a result, progressive organizations are beginning to align sales, marketing and customer success technology, data and KPIs to provide an end-to-end view of the revenue-generating engine. The shift to a more end-to-end revenue operations view means enablement leaders should provide enablement support not only to the frontline sales force, but to other revenue generation roles found in marketing, sales and customer success.”

Such end-to-end revenue operations and enablement foster a continuous feedback loop across the buyer journey for a singular go-to-market model. Much preferred, one would think, to the aforementioned siloed functions of a linear buyer model.

Consider then the inputs and outputs the RecVue platform is responsible for processing, and you’ll see the similarities.

Contract Order Management

• Product and pricing configuration
• Contracts
• Approvals management

Data Mediation

• Multi-source data mapping
• Mediation integration

Billing

• Agile billing
• Price-based billing
• Asset billing
• Billing schedules
• Invoice management

Revenue Recognition

• Configurable revenue rules
• Standalone selling price
• Contract modifications
• Revenue schedules
• Real-time revenue batch runs
• Accounting entries for GL interface

Partner Compensation

• Configurable revenue share
• Attribute-based rules for payment calculations
• Automate pay-side obligations
• Calculate revenue for distributors, resellers and third-party partners
• Payment schedules
• Pay runs with pre-validations
• Output interface to AP

Insights

• Standard and operational insights
• ARR & MRR
• Data as a Service

Taken individually, that is a whole maze of complex processes to consider. Taken together, well, as you can see for yourself, RecVue truly is at the center, controlling it all for your most important business needs.

When you are trying to respond to all the complicated needs essential to today’s digital economy, with the foresight to scale accordingly, the solution to oversee it all should do your thinking for you.

With RecVue, your order-to-cash has its brain.

If you would like to learn more about how RecVue's Order-to-Cash solutions can become the thinking center to help automate and consolidate your organization’s complex billing processes, contact us for more information or to schedule a demo.