For most businesses, cash flow is crucial to continue operations. Cash coming in ensures that you can pay for operating expenses as well as invest in the growth of the business. However, cash that is tied up in accounts receivable (AR) is not available and can be a huge drain on the business. Keeping up with AR is crucial because the longer it takes to collect on overdue accounts, the less likely you will ever collect and the more likely your business could fail.

Implementing an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solution can help you optimize the monitoring and collection of these debts and therefore help ensure your company's continuing success.

What Is ECM?

Today's businesses must deal with an enormous amount of information to maintain crucial operations and remain competitive. Thankfully, they no longer must deal with stacks of paper documents and walls of file cabinets. Most all their important information is in digital format. However, that information must still be collected, managed, stored and made available when needed. That's where an ECM solution comes in. ECM is an umbrella term for the set of strategies, technologies, and tools needed to collect, organize and store digital information and deliver it to a designated audience.

Specific examples of areas where ECM is especially helpful by including human resources for things such as employment applications, insurance forms, and payroll information. It should also include contract management services, such as digital collaboration, creating and editing contracts, and notifying parties when they need attention, plus financial services for credit analysis, accounts payable, accounts receivable and even collection activities.

How Can ECM Optimize AR?

Making sure you stay on top of cash flow is crucial to the success of your business, and managing your AR is key. With an ECM solution, account managers can easily find and route documents quickly and efficiently. You can automatically send invoices, process payments, and be notified when an account is nearing its due date. It can store and provide all necessary documents required in an invoicing dispute or legal proceeding. It frees up staff to focus on important tasks such as credit analysis and reporting.

An ECM can also reduce risks for your company. It consolidates all your different AR activities under one system so valuable records are easily found for compliance and legal purposes. It can manage the routing of contracts for approval and securely stores them. ECM software also comes in extremely handy during an audit.

Overall, using an ECM for your AR activities can reduce your average days sales outstanding (DSO) by increasing the speed of customer payments. This is crucial for maintaining your business's cash flow and improving your bottom line. Learn more by contacting enterprise content management services.

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