Our primary goal is to get you the money you’ve earned. After spending the last few months talking to almost all of our customers individually about their accounts receivables pain, we planned and built out some great new things for you—including our amazing new Receivables Dashboard. We are excited about what’s in store for this week’s release and for the future! But first, some numbers for you….
Receivables Management Study
One recent learning experience for us came through a study we conducted with our friends at Lab42. We asked them to survey 100+ small businesses who use cloud-based accounting systems and who have revenues of between $5 and $50 million. The topic: learn more about their business’ processes for managing accounts receivable, especially how much time gets wasted following up on invoices.
Here are a few of the key findings:
- AR is anything but a solo task. In fact, 40% of small businesses have at least 5 or more people involved.
- Of the companies surveyed, 36% spent 11-40 hours per month on accounts receivable, 37% spent 41-160 hours and 18% spent more than 160 hours per month.
- Of the companies surveyed, 74% had two or more full-time people engaged in receivables management, and 41% had more than 5 people regularly engaged in receivables management.
- Of the time spent on AR tasks, about half of it is spent either tracking and managing the process or printing and mailing invoices and reminder notes.
- Of the companies surveyed, 92% of invoices required at least one additional touch to get paid!
So, it is with this data that we bring you the new, elegant, Receivables Dashboard!
New: ZenCash Receivables Dashboard
We’ve built some pretty great tools for managing your AR, but we are constantly sculpting and pushing our products to new places as we learn from you along the way. One such learning is regarding the “first impression” inside the app—and specifically, how could ZenCash do a better job of surfacing the most important bits of AR data in one place.
I am excited to announce that today that we are bringing our sexy new dashboard to life!
At the top, we bring the most important metrics together: Average Days to Pay and your total outstanding amounts. Over to the right, you can see the total broken down into three buckets: Current (shown in green), Past Due (yellow), and Default (red).
Then, there is a three-panel chart that allows you to select one of the these three views:
Weekly receivables history
This shows you a week-by-week look at how healthy your company is from an AR perspective. So ideally, each week would show all “green”—and you want the trend to be more green over time, vs more yellow or red.
Outstanding invoices by due date
This shows a current snapshot of all outstanding invoices, plotted on a timeline by their respective due dates. So you can see with clarity the distribution of your accounts receivable. Are there a bunch clumped up on the left in red? Or are things mostly clean on the left side of the timeline and there’s just nice green ones near the right?
Payments by payment date
This chart reveals just the payment information for your business without regard to the underlying invoice date, due date, etc.
Section 3 provides two tables—one showing recent actions that have been completed by us and the one on the right showing upcoming actions. You will note that any actions that are performed in the current stage will show up in green, while actions performed when an invoice is past due will show up in yellow, and ones in default, in red.
Finally, one of our favorite parts of the dashboard is this last section—and not because we have some weird desire to highlight your problems, but because it’s healthy to know where your weaknesses are so you can tackle them head on.
Gallery of Debtors
(Best said out-loud and in a tunnel of some sort so you get an over-done echo) This section serves as a visual reminder of where your most challenging customers are—sorted either by the largest outstanding amounts, or by the highest days to pay. In both cases, we also show what percentage of your overall AR each customer makes up, helping you to see any possible concentration risk.
That’s it. We hope you enjoy it. Use it a bit and then give us some feedback. If you love it, tweet it. If you hate it, email me at bc at zencash dot com and tell me about it personally.
bc
