Accounts receivable exceptions are an unfortunate fact of life for most businesses.

But new technology promises to change that.

Less than half of all businesses post the majority of their receivables straight-through, without human operator intervention, according to a 2015 survey conducted by IOFM.  Worse, one-third of the businesses surveyed by IOFM admit that they post none of their receivables straight-through.

There are a lot of reasons for these paltry straight-through processing rates: incorrect or missing data elements, remittance data that arrives in a format that the supplier cannot process, unauthorized deductions or adjustments taken by customers, the inability of legacy systems to accept remittance data feeds (many businesses still rely on spreadsheets for processing!), and fragmented systems.

Complicating matters, 50 percent of businesses must rekey the remittance data they receive via e-mails and nearly as many businesses must rekey the remittance data they receive as paper.

Not surprisingly, one quarter of businesses surveyed by IOFM cite improving efficiency as the top priority for their receivable department in 2015, while 9 percent of businesses say reducing the cost of receivables processing is a top priority and 8 percent say that reducing errors is a top priority.

What’s more, a whopping 84 percent of businesses have a high or moderate level of interest in increasing their level of automation for managing remittance data, the Remittance Coalition finds.

An emerging technology can help with all of this.

Integrated receivables solutions improve straight-through processing rates in five ways:

1. Aggregating payments and their remittance detail, regardless of the channel.
2. Assisting with discount/deduction management.
3. Providing consolidated reporting and accounts receivable feeds.
4. Automating the consolidation of internal and external data sources.
5. Providing trend analysis to help identify the source of exceptions.

 All of this accelerates the application of cash and information.

To learn more about how integrated receivables solutions can improve your straight-through processing rates, email us at sales@creditron.com or call us at 1.888.721.9510.