We are in the age of the performance economy, and with that comes high expectations for our customer experience. Investing in CX results in returns in customer satisfaction and ultimately, your bottom line. Meet your customers’ rising expectations by streamlining your internal processes and optimizing your finance tech stack, starting with automated billing. 

Optimizing your quote to cash process can seem like a daunting task, but maintaining the status quo with disconnected systems and operational inefficiencies places a much greater drag on your business. Where other billing systems are inflexible when it comes to complex pricing scenarios, Ordway is able to help businesses scale their operations and meet their customer needs. 

Read on for six ways that Ordway helped SaaS finance leaders optimize their own quote to cash process. 

Ordway is releasing a new whitepaper, The Ultimate Guide to Architecting a Flexible Finance Stack for Complex Business Models, to help multilayered businesses prepare for the next stage of growth.  

This whitepaper was inspired by the challenges that our customers have encountered prior to partnering with Ordway, such as:

• Disconnected systems creating blockers and inhibiting growth
• Gaps between sales and finance teams 
• Costly systems maintenance and third-party consultants 

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. 

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.

While it may have taken grand ideas and more than a little ingenuity to build some of today’s most well-known companies (e.g., Amazon, Apple, Disney, Google, HP and Microsoft started in their founders’ garages), the long-term success of businesses these days is built on the backs of customer relationships.

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.

As if the global marketplace wasn’t volatile enough, factors like the COVID-19 pandemic and a technical skills shortage are making it even more difficult for companies to make ends meet each month. 

As we discuss elsewhere, productivity is a big issue for today’s resource-constrained teams. This is especially the case with distractions brought about by the “new normal” of widespread work from home (WFH). Some employees are contending with getting their jobs done while also caring for family members and keeping households running smoothly (here's a list of 32 tips for working from home). As a result, more lean organizations around the world are finding it increasingly challenging to accomplish the many administrative tasks that consume so many hours of their days such as inputting contract details, setting billing schedules, sending reminders, and so on. Carving out time in the day to focus on strategic activities that can actually grow the business is an afterthought for upwards of 50% of an employee's time.

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. 

Financial services may be a bit slower to the automation game than other sectors, but many organizations are now recognizing significant advantages from the integration of billing, revenue, and subscription management software into their IT systems.