The longer a dispute drags on, the more difficult it will be to settle. And your company’s image will suffer as a result. It is therefore imperative to detect the reason for a dispute, and its relevance, as early as possible in the Order-to-Cash chain. So how can you improve dispute resolution as quickly as possible?
Digitization as a detection aid
In most cases, disputes are linked to your supplier’s internal organization. It may be a delivery problem, known as a commercial dispute, or an error in the purchase order or in identifying the invoice recipient, known as an administrative dispute. Depending on the cause of the dispute, the person in charge of handling it at your supplier’s may vary. So you need not only a fast dispute detector, but also an intelligent tool capable of addressing the right person.
Organizing your invoices makes it much easier to detect disputes. Setting up an algorithm, or workflow, for resolving disputes helps to identify them in advance of invoice deadlines. Among other things, in a dispute resolution workflow, a change of status generates a change of contributor, so that disputes can be dealt with as quickly as possible. This avoids the need for legal proceedings. Such a system will intervene to record the reason for the dispute, the target date for resolution and the people involved. This 3-in-1 operational tool is designed to deliver speed, detection and relevance.
In addition, your management tool can also display the status of the dispute: new, validated, booked or rejected, etc. Each status change triggers new alerts and notifications to the people concerned. E-mails or other relevant means of contact are then sent to the right people. In this way, digitization takes into account your dispute, a debit note or the creation of a credit note in accounting, etc. In other words, rather than opting for a divining rod to detect the source of your problems, digitization brings you modern, responsive tools.
The human hand, the driver of all decisions
Digitizing a dispute calls for human intervention in all decision-making processes. The human being remains the pilot for the digitization of these processes in order to validate a choice. In a company, a financial management tool provides you with a co-pilot in charge of detection, so that all you have to do is process the key decisions.
But these processes need to be complemented by other data. For example, a statistical study of disputes can help you define your priorities for eliminating their sources. Ultimately, co-piloted digitalization accelerates cash flow, while improving customer relations and satisfaction, as well as your links with suppliers.
The CashOnTime solution, optimizing your customer relations
CashOnTime has the capacity to manage disputes as a co-pilot. “Our business as a wholesaler generates specific flows linked to the financing of our suppliers’ operations with our customers, so our customers make numerous deductions from their payments,” explains Dorothée POULETTE, Customer Relations Manager at INNOV8. “Using the dispute module enables us to centralize all these various deductions, as well as all disputes linked to price or quantity discrepancies.
And the benefits of this intelligent system don’t stop there. “This centralization enables each validator to carry out analysis actions as quickly as possible to validate or contest each dispute file, and also to share the information leading to this decision,” adds Dorothée POULETTE.
What’s more, CashOnTime’s centralized information system benefits customer relations. A conclusion shared by Dorothée POULETTE: “This centralization makes it possible to limit e-mail and document exchanges, thus optimizing our processing times, as well as information sharing. Our users have noticed an improvement in turnaround times, as they are no longer overwhelmed by email exchanges and multiple reminder actions, which were previously necessary.”
