Late last week, Citibank made headlines when, rather than sending $7.8M in interest payments on the behalf of their client (cosmetics giant Revlon), Citibank accidentally sent $900M to creditors.

About a month ago, Ordway reached out to me to share the following post with their audience. They had seen my work at Women Conquer Business helping organizations adapt and change in an age of disruption, and wanted to share this resource with you all as we approach 2021. 

We are excited to be able to announce that Ordway has been recognized by the 2020 Stratus Awards for Cloud Computing. This award highlights companies and individuals disrupting industries with innovative technologies, and that’s exactly what we’re aiming to do at Ordway. 

to dun (dŭn) tr.vbto make repeated and insistent demands upon, especially for the payment of a debt; often involves escalating degrees of intensity; term first recorded in English in 1620–30. 

You’d be hard pressed to find many people who actually enjoy chasing down clients for late payments, but it’s a challenge that businesses have had to deal with for as long as people have been trading products and services… Payments are sometimes late, and tough economic times only put more pressure on accounting teams to recover payments and balance the books each month.

If the process of chasing down payments—a.k.a., “dunning” in accounting parlance—has in fact been around since at least 1620, then you’d think that someone would have come up with a no-fail way to guarantee timely payment by now. 

Yet, while no single methodology can guarantee timely revenue recovery, you can take steps to improve your quote-to-cash process. Our recommendation: Implement a solid dunning management strategy that caters to your customers’ ways of doing business with you.

Scaling a SaaS business is a unique challenge, and a good problem to have. The need to scale comes from an increase in customers and ARR, and likely greater headcount as well. As you scale, it’s critical that the backbone of your business- your billing and revenue system- is scaling along with you. 

With the term “digital transformation” splashed across business pages for some years now, it’s far too easy to think of it as a “Big Bang” occurrence—a once-in-a-lifetime experience that alters the universe forever. Technology is constantly evolving and the digital transformations we’re witnessing today have their origins in long-progressing industry shifts. The seeds of these shifts were planted many seasons ago.

Energy is big business. This spotlight features a Canadian company that’s working to change the energy game. As one of the first social enterprises in Canada, Bullfrog Power uses business as a catalyst for social and environmental change. It embraces the principles of the performance economy by adhering to performance, transparency and accountability all while moving the needle on social and environmental outcomes.

Read these spotlights for more Performance Economy inspiration:

• M32 Connect – Uses a proprietary, machine learning–driven SaaS “platform of platforms” to help digital publishers maximize the revenue they earn from their advertising assets
• Indigo Ag – Uses data-driven technological innovations to rethink farming from seed to soil to sale

We love it when we get to witness the performance economy in action. Why? We believe that, now and in the future, sustainable business success is dependent on delivering greater value with every transaction. But, not just any value... it must be demonstrable to the customer. 

This demonstrability—or “transparency,” as the model calls it—is woven through every fiber of the modern-day performance economy, especially in the way that businesses measure and optimize success for their customers. And digital technology is a key tool in making that transparency possible.

This next performance economy spotlight features a company—Indigo Agriculture—that’s using technology to embed value in every level of their business. What’s more, they’re working to support the environment while doing so.

I’m excited to join Ordway as head of Sales because in my 30 year career I’ve often been hampered in my ability to serve the needs of my customers, chiefly because the Finance team couldn’t support an ideal commercial relationship. 

Following on previous spotlights on businesses that are using automation and other digital innovations to deliver greater customer value, we’re excited to feature M32 Connect—an AdTech and analytics company that helps publishers maximize the revenue they get from their digital ad assets using a proprietary, machine learning–driven SaaS platform.