Features and Overview

Chargebee Receivables is an intelligent accounts receivable (AR) management and collection automation platform that helps you view, track, and collect unpaid invoices from your customers. It provides complete visibility into your receivables data and reduces the time required to collect unpaid or outstanding invoices. It has an intuitive dashboard interface that enables better collection management so collectors, agents, or the sales team get a 360-degree view of AR data in your business.

Receivables is equipped with many built-in features and functionalities that help businesses save time by automating the process of sending recurring reminder emails to customers. With Receivables, you can automate the entire AR/collection process for your business to quickly and effectively collect money from your customers. Additionally, Receivables offers a variety of reporting options so you can view and track how well your customers are engaged with your reminders.

Below are the notable features of Receivables to help you understand more about the application:

• AR Visibility
• Auto Engagement
• Receivables CRM (Collector Queue)
• Dispute Management
• Integrated Reports
• AR Analytics
• Self-Serve Client Portal

Why use Receivables?

Businesses face many challenges, from managing accounts receivable to reconciling payments with minimal remittance information to getting invoices paid faster. Chargebee Receivables offers a modernized approach to AR that gives you more control over the AR process to complement your existing people, processes, and technology. Chargebee Receivables offers many built-in features that make your business AR/collection process more efficient and easier. Some of the main features are:

• Automate the collection/receivables processes in your business and provide hassle-free management of all collections and related transaction activities.
• View and track unpaid invoices and generate reports easily from the Receivables dashboard.
• Speed up the collection/AR process by automating email and SMS reminders, or by setting reminders for the outstanding or overdue amount for specific customers.
• Easily integrate ERPs for streamlining your business functions and processes.
• Identify and resolve any potential disputes on invoices and credit notes. With dispute management, your customers can also raise disputes for any transactions by providing reasons or feedback.
• Gain sophisticated insights on your customers and their transactions by cross-referencing customer and transaction data.

Here is an example that demonstrates how Chargebee Receivables can help businesses and collectors automate the entire collection/AR process.

Scenario:

Orco Inc. is an upstream chemical manufacturing business supplying oil, gas, and advanced energy resources to various regional markets and continents. Some of its customers include mobilization units, refineries, and premier gas resources. The collector agents and the sales team at Orco collect money from the customers against supplied resources. Collectors at Orco document all the collection-related activities in a comprehensive log and update whenever any activity happens. One of the main challenges that collectors face is getting their customers to pay on time so they don't run out of money. Maintaining a comprehensive log isn't the best approach as it is not only time-consuming and error-prone but also not scalable. With Chargebee Receivables, Orco can automate the entire collections/receivables process, including analyzing customer payment data, sending timely reminders, managing disputes, and incentivizing customers to pay early. All that while maintaining high customer satisfaction ratings with Receivables CRM.

Key Features of Receivables

Receivables offers various features that simplify the entire collection/receivables process in your business. It helps reduce the manual efforts of your collectors managing the cash flow of the business.

AR Visibility

Receivables provides a 360-degree view of your AR data, including invoices, financial activity, and CRM data in one place. It allows you to view and manage all your financial and accounting data in a single view without having to rely on ERPs. You can easily import all your AR data into Receivables and sync with ERPs without spending time modifying the data.

With Receivables, you have access to a secure, real-time, and consolidated view of all your AR data in one place. You also get complete visibility of your AR data across multiple visibility options such as customers, locations, business units, and reportees.

Once AR data is synced from the existing ERPs, Receivables automatically populates your collections/AR data into the Receivables AR Dashboard. You can access and control the information based on different views (Customer and Transaction view) in the Receivables AR Dashboard.

Auto Engagement

Receiving payments is a fundamental part of handling finances in any business. While managing business collection activities and accounts receivable, teams may often face challenges communicating with customers and maintaining real-time AR data distributed among teams. Also, communicating with customers and sending recurring manual email reminders may make the process time-consuming. Receivables' intelligent automation reminder engine allows you to schedule automatic email and SMS reminders to your customers based on specific rules and frequencies. It provides you with better visibility and the capability to track your customer's payments and manage the AR data effortlessly.

Some of its features include:

• Sending outstanding, overdue, payment acknowledgment, and account statement email or SMS reminders to your customers.
• Customizable rules to target specific customers based on various conditions and collection activities.

Receivables CRM

Receivables CRM is a great way to channel your business leads so you can have better conversations and engagement with your customers. With a simple and intuitive interface, you get clear visibility about your customers and payments, as well as a set of operations to manage collection activities. It helps you quickly track customer interactions and data, as well as forecast future payments for invoices. The Receivables CRM helps you with the following:

• Gain insights on customer data: When you have multiple business units and a large volume of customer data, it becomes difficult to manage and observe the collection workflows. Receivables CRM provides user-level, hierarchy-based permissions for access to customer data. Collectors can get more insights into customer data by analyzing their payment behavior and collection-related activities.
• Improve customer service: Delivering an excellent customer experience is crucial to any business. The better the customer experience, the more positive reviews and repeat customers you'll receive. The features of Receivables CRM not only improve your customer service but also ensure that your customers are more satisfied with your services.
• Prioritize activities: A successful business needs to prioritize its most important activities in collection/AR workflows. Receivables CRM makes it easy to focus on what's urgent and important. You can make better decisions regarding all collection activities by prioritizing the tasks and collection-related activities.

Dispute Management

Chargebee Receivables has an intelligent, automated dispute management system that provides clarity on disputes raised against invoices and arrears. Its smart workflow allows raising disputes in two easy ways. Your customer can either raise disputes for invoices directly from the client portal and upload supporting documents, or by replying to your email and SMS. The functions of Receivables Dispute Management module provide:

• Real-time tracking of disputes from the self-service portal and highlighting them on the Receivables dashboard.
• Strong coordination and communication across all stakeholders and creating up-to-date aging and net aging reports.
• Automated management system to resolve disputes efficiently and quickly.

Integrated Reports

Receivables offers integrated reporting and management system to get an overview of AR data, efficiency of collection activities, and team performance. It helps you track business collection, customer, and financial data in one place. Receivables Reports provide insights into how the business is performing across different visibilities such as customers, location, business unit, and more. You can filter and configure these reports to extract important data points from different reports.

Receivables Integrated Report offers the following capabilities:

• Allows businesses to track user performance and collections over time.
• Provides clear visibility on AR data at customer and transaction level to help collectors analyze their customers' outstanding invoices and transactions.
• Helps CFOs and finance leaders analyze cash projection based on Promise to Pay (PTP) date given by customers.
• Provides a summary of all the cases, disputes, and issues that are created based on customer issues.
• Sends email-based reports to generate high-level overviews of complex reports.
• Allows users to customize the reports and schedule subscriptions for configured reports.

AR Analytics

Using the Receivables AR analytics feature, you get clear insights and cash forecasting based on payment commitments and payment behaviors. Receivables represents the data as timely trends that enable you to make better decisions on financial data. Analytics helps businesses perform historical analysis of data by giving a clear insight into payment adjustment and key indicators to measure progress. This will also help in analyzing the KPIs and operational goals to see if they are aligned with business objectives.

Self-Serve Client Portal

Receivables' Self-Serve Client Portal allows your customers to view and access their account payables data, invoices, and financial data. It also allows customers to download account and ledger statements effortlessly. With the Self-Serve Client Portal, customers can take control of their account payables and stay informed about their transaction activities. It also allows them to pay online and take actions on invoices by raising disputes and promising to pay.

You can configure the client portal dashboard and its components according to your business requirements. It allows you to enable or disable the features that are visible to your customers.

Who can use Chargebee Receivables?

Receivables helps you set up different user personas and roles. You can define the access permission for each of these roles based on their key operations. Below are some sample user personas/roles that you can create in Receivables to help you organize your team's data access:

• Collectors or Collection Agents
• Sales Team
• AR Head or AR Manager
• CFO
• Customer Ops and CSM

Common User Personas and Actions in Receivables

Receivables gives you the ability to create specific user personas along with the permissions to be associated with them.

The following are example user personas and their actions summarized below to help you better manage your team in the application:

Collectors or Collection Agents

Apart from collecting payments and assisting customers to make payments early, collectors or collection agents can perform the following actions in Receivables:

• Analyze customer and transaction records, manage disputes, and resolve any issues with payments such as discrepancies in invoice quantities.
• Collect outstanding accounts receivable (AR) and maintain customer goodwill.
• Resolve customer disputes, credit demands, raise issues, and immediately make decisions on specific cases assigned to them.
• Assist and make courtesy reminders on customer payments whenever required using the Collections Intelligent Reminder Engine. Collectors can use any of the services like SMS, email, or automated calls to communicate and reconcile customer accounts.
• Record activities on an old version of the Collector Queue function that includes raising issues, taking notes, responding to customers, and so on.
• Review AR reports, analyze customer trends, accounts, and Daily Sales Outstanding (DSO).

Sales as Collector

Salespeople are advisors to their customers, collecting data and understanding the customer's needs in order to assist the customer and guide them to the right products. In Receivables, the sales user persona can perform the following actions:

• They have control over the customer account for which the service or product has been sold. They monitor the account receivables, past dues, and help ensure the revenue workflow of the organization.
• They help facilitate the process of reviewing and correcting errant invoices.
• They make follow-up calls to obtain further sales orders and determine if the customer wants to pay early.

AR Head/AR Manager

In Receivables, the AR Head or AR Manager user persona can have the following responsibilities and actions:

• They are responsible for managing a team of collectors and overseeing their collection activities.
• They have full control over the data for all the collectors in the team, customers, and payments/transaction data.

CFO

CFOs are the core decision makers in business functions and have permissions to see all the customers in their business unit and location. In Receivables, the CFO user persona can have the following permissions and responsibilities:

• They get complete access and visibility on customers, account receivables, finance analytics, reports, and user personas such as collectors, AR Head, managers, and so on.
• They effectively process and make high-level decisions on Receivable Aging, AR Turnover, and Collection Effectiveness Index (CEI).

With Receivables User Management settings, you can create more such user personas and set permissions for them based on your business requirements and preferences.