Real life intern experience #1: Cameron McNeil

Cameron McNeil

This Summer, we have supported young ambitious people with a flair for sales and marketing by providing sought-after internships.  The roles have provided crucial experience, helped develop skills and improved CVs. The internships involved marketing and sales, from prospect segmentation, through research and in-depth analysis on competitors & markets, to value proposition creation, email send-outs and ROI analysis.

One of our interns, Cameron McNeil, who had a ‘mixed mode’ role looking after marketing and sales elements, reports on his experience:

“Having studied Business Management for two years at university, being accepted onto ReadSoft’s Summer internship programme was an opportunity I felt extremely privileged to be a part of. While my university studies and previous work experience had given me a solid grounding on today’s business environment, I knew that real world experiences are what would set me apart from competing graduates when I begin to seek full-time employment upon graduation in 2014.

Having experienced life at ReadSoft now for 6 weeks, it doesn’t surprise me that the firm is experiencing great success. The environment and culture the firm works with breeds success; For instance the open nature of the office means going to talk to senior management isn’t embedded with the difficulties that many firms experience. Rather, the business encourages communication in all departments and any idea is worth mentioning. Further to this the instant inclusion of being a part of the overall goals at the business, made me motivated to help the business continue with its growth.

The real world experiences I have encountered at ReadSoft have developed my own attributes considerably. Learning how to use sophisticated marketing tools, discovering how to target messages at specific market sectors and calling potential clientele are all tasks I have been attributed with. I particularly leaned from the handful of networking events I participated in. Holding conversations with marketers and corporate giants such as GSK and Sony, as well as looking for prospects at these events, are experiences that have educated me in business no end. Being given the responsibility and opportunity to go to these events was particularly pleasing as it showed that ReadSoft had the commitment to help me grow while also believing I was competent enough to hold my ground amongst individuals with greater experience in the world of business.

The time I have so far spent here at ReadSoft has exceeded my expectations as an intern. The management, responsibilities, creativity and inclusion of the whole organisation has left me increasingly motivated to finish my internship with a flourish and help meet the targets that the firm has over the next several months while I am there.”

UK small firms suffering with late payments

A parliamentary inquiry has found that UK SMEs are suffering unnecessarily over the amount of time it takes for them to collect payment for goods and services.  As a result, politicians are trying to force large corporations to publish how long they take to pay small firms.

British small-to-medium enterprises were owed more than £36bn in late payments last year and more than 124,000 small and micro businesses said they were almost put out of business by late payments.  The Federation of Small Businesses stated that with an average wait of 58 days, between completion and payment for services, SMEs are under even more pressure to stay afloat.

Our advice for small businesses chasing payments would be that while there’s no legislation to keep payments to a reasonable term, you’re going to need to spend the time chasing.  But how do you make that time in your business while you’re meant to be out there selling and growing?

You can free up time by automating your supplier invoicing process.  By using our cloud based solution – ReadSoft Online – which doesn’t require software installation, upgrades, or a visit from ‘the IT guy’, you can simply take your invoices, not matter the format they arrive in, electronic or paper and get them in to your finance system.  No retyping, no errors, no late payments and best of all – no admin for you.

You gain reduced costs – but importantly increased time to get your outstanding payments in, on time and keep your cashflow healthy.  ReadSoft Online, with it’s simple subscription price plan can cost less than your mobile phone bill per month.  Why wouldn’t you use it?  Find out more and sign up here.

Merry Christmas!

 

 

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!!

Does Cloud computing still constitute a security risk for your business?

Gartner has recently conducted research of 425 IT risk managers and similar in the UK, US, Germany and Canada into the take up of Cloud and SaaS services.  Unsurprisingly the key drivers of take up were still around cost and agility, whilst the primary concerns expressed by respondents were based around an immature ecosystem, licensing and integration between localised and Cloud services.

Speaking at Gartner’s Catalyst Conference, analyst Guy Creese commented that SaaS or cloud applications still need to offer reassurances to customers around security issues.  Security is bound to be one of the most important concerns for companies using Cloud services.  To illustrate this, consider two examples: one of a small business looking to increase business efficiencies through Cloud and a large company looking to outsource back office functionality to a Cloud-based BPO.

For the smaller company security may actually be enhanced by moving to a Cloud-based system.  How many small companies can afford the levels of security and redundancy that a SaaS or Cloud Service Provider will have in place?  In this case moving from a local it infrastructure set up to a Cloud-based service may well enhance security as well as driving business efficiencies.

For the larger company, the issues will be more complex.  But most large businesses would recognise that a move from internally resourcing the back office to a BPO will need to be properly scoped, with security being one of the factors (along with reliability, backup, support, integration and a host of others) that will need to be considered when  choosing the right BPO partner.

There is no reason why Cloud or SaaS services need to be less secure than an internal solution – just as long as those scoping the requirements from a third party fully consider the provider’s capabilities, service levels, track record and brand values.

Moving to Cloud and SaaS services should save a business time and money, but not at the cost of a reduced level of security.  Businesses, large and small, looking at Cloud solutions will need to reassure themselves  that the third party provider will deliver a service at least as effective as their own before committing to the Cloud.

Related articles

• Which Cloud Model is Right for Your Company? (datacenterknowledge.com)
• Survey Says: Buyers Love the Cloud (servicesangle.com)
• Cloud Computing: BPM Solutions (cloudcomputing.sys-con.com)

Winning the war over chaotic business data

Have you ever considered automating your enterprise content management (ECM) system? If you haven’t, then ask yourself this, how much data resides in your ECM sites, and how many sites do you have? Then ask how your compliance officers cope with data proliferation and the risk of lost documents? Finally do you know what your business’ financial costs are in terms of the offsite storage and retrieval of paper documents? If you struggle to answer any of these questions with any sort of confidence then automation is a valid consideration.

The reason for this is that ECM encompasses the strategies, methods, and tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organisational processes. More so than ever, it is the ECM system which is helping your business manage its data.

That data comes in many forms, from well managed line-of-business systems, such as a CRM or ERP system, which provide a company’s structured data, to the unstructured – such as paper and electronic documents. Do understand that structured data accounts for only a small amount of information within an organisation.  The majority of data, documents and other files created by a business are not in a database or LOB system, so are unstructured and unmanaged.  It is this data which represents enormous potential value if it is managed efficiently and with the intent of driving business forward.

ECM takes this often chaotic mix of unstructured data sat on the shared network drive, on desktops, or in emails, and puts it into a manageable structure that is appropriate to your business. When handling both structured and unstructured data, ECM helps avoid the chaos of duplication, rework and wasted time and money.

Widely deployed in organisations of every size in every country Microsoft SharePoint has become the most popular ECM on the market. But many businesses are still looking for new ways to gain more value from their existing deployment, and this is where automation can drive a business forward if you adhere to some basic rules.

Remember, your ECM system will only ever be as good as its index, so plan how your ECM is to be automated. Consider the taxonomy and think departmental within the enterprise, ask your employees how they do things before you change anything, especially at departmental levels, and then establish a roll-out plan with executive-level sponsorship.

When rolling out ensure there is consideration of the needs for a ‘manual to automated’ migration, and create consistency across paper and electronic content.

Crucially automate classification for easy retrieval by automating metadata creation. We all use metadata to varying extents, but by making this core to an automated ECM you provide your business with easily searchable content, both new and historical, which helps speed up document retrieval,  reducing manual work and improving the user experience.  For the business, this means no more bottlenecks in the workflow, processes are faster and more compliant and the company can gain crucial business agility in the marketplace.

Related articles

• SharePoint Surge Continues but Strategies are Lacking (prweb.com)
• The Mandate to Go Paperless (advancingthepaperlessoffice.com)

Regaining control of Accounts Receivable

Inefficiencies in the finance function can critically impact the bottom line and the viability of a business to grow and flourish. For Accounts Receivable (AR) functions, month end can be a time to dread, requiring additional staff be reallocated from other business critical functions.

A good barometer for the likelihood of bad debt provision is Day Sale Outstanding (DSO) giving the number of days it takes on average to turn a sale into cash in the bank. The problem is there are often no targets around the quality of the sales ledger, the number of queries resolved, or the reduction of costs. How robust a company’s position is will be defined by the impact of unallocated cash. Unfortunately these metrics often go unmeasured and uncontrolled.

Overall, a sales ledger should be as clean and as accurate as possible; after all it is the record of what is owed, by whom and when it is due for payment. Any unallocated cash more than seven days old is a sure sign of poor control. Unallocated cash on account occurs when goods or services have been provided and a customer has paid for them. The cash receipt has been matched to the customer’s account but not the payment. Unallocated cash on suspense/holding account is a case where goods or services have been provided and a customer has paid for them, however the cash receipt has not been matched to either the customer’s account or the invoice. In these cases the number and value of credit notes issued becomes a key indicator of poor operational delivery, a lack of quality of goods and service provided, and errors in pricing or invoicing.

So what changes can be made to the way credit with customers is managed and controlled to deliver a more effective business and better understand and control cash receipts?

First and foremost it is about understanding customer payment behaviour – particularly how and when customers pay. If a customer is paying beyond terms, what pattern emerges?  Like your own organisation, your customers will have their own behaviours. But this does not mean just letting customers pay when they want. Rather it is about making use of available metrics to better analyse and understand payment patterns and trends, and then align your systems and process with those of your customers.

Such behaviour led approach can save money through reduced credit management costs and can also improve cash received. It focuses time and effort into debtor analysis and makes credit management a scalable function rather than a fixed cost. By removing the ‘noise’ associated with unmatched credits it should be possible to bring an end to the administrative activity that detracts from the real job: to manage credit limits and collect overdue cash. So the first step is to put in place straightforward metrics that help to better understand the issues.

When the finance organisation is understood as a series of processes, it is possible to monitor the costs of each transaction. This helps to appreciate the value that each of these processes adds, and whether there is a more efficient approach.

The vast majority of these finance processes can now be simply and effectively automated, providing a stable and reliable set of metrics, regardless of the day of the month.  One of the most effective means of automation is though intelligent document scanning and workflow processing. System automation can halve the cost of cash allocation per invoice and deliver greater levels of control than previously available. Unlike the traditional manual process which is almost impossible to performance manage; an automated process constantly updates the number of receipts remaining unallocated and their status.

This helps to provide a greater accuracy to allocation of funds and in many cases, more than 98% of receipts are allocated to invoice first time. This then enables credit control personnel to focus on a very small number of queries, ensuring that these are dealt with quickly and efficiently, vastly improving the cash position of a company.

Download the whitepaper:
Accounts Recievable: Making Month End Just Another Day

Sustainability: Paperless office | Business Excellence Magazine

The much talked-about ‘paperless office’ remains more of a myth than reality—but businesses can still continue to take steps towards it, says Simon Shorthose.

Despite all the hype, business technology and the environment often make uncomfortable bedfellows. In recent years this has become apparent with organisations ‘going green’ as part of the corporate social responsibility drive. When the global downturn bit, it was the crusade to go green that was one of the first things to be shelved, but this may well have been a short-sighted decision.

The recession did deliver one bonus for the environment: the use of paper in UK offices fell nine per cent in 2009. Unfortunately, this was an aberration of a downsized market, with average levels falling just one per cent each year since 2000 (according to data from the National Association of Paper Merchants, 2010). The inability to deliver a paperless office environment is perhaps the great eco-failure of modern business, because here is a way that companies can actually make a change for the better, and positively impact on the environment.

The myth of the ‘paperless’ office

It is not a difficult sell to encourage business to think about moving towards a ‘paperless’ office. We all recognise that scraps of paper and old file folders are business-inefficient, and that going paperless should deliver greater return on hardware, software, and technology investment. Many will say they operate a paperless environment and point to the use of scanners instead of copying machines, sending electronic faxes, and PCs where thousands of messages stored in e-mail inboxes or documents in databases would otherwise have generated reams of paper files.

All true; but the reality is that this takes us only a step closer to the paperless office, and there will always be a need for hard copy. Last year when the census again dropped on my doormat, it was a great example of a large paper document that had to be processed in an office—but it could also have been an invoice, or a job application. The Gartner Group estimates that when invoices are handled manually, they are usually copied 11 times before they are passed around for approval as internal mail! The problem then is to address how we can reduce what are perceived as critical services that currently demand paper copies and demonstrate that technology can not only make a difference to the environment, but crucially, can improve daily business operations.

We believe that accounts payable automation is a crucial part of the progression towards a paperless environment. The financial division is an early adopter, scanning incoming bills into the system; and then this expands to include all general business correspondence across all other divisions. What we have seen is a true environmental effect across our customers worldwide. By running just invoices through a scanner and automated document management software, we are seeing an active reduction in the need for paper copies.

Save a tree, save money

Our customers alone process more than 270 million invoices every year, a figure that continues to climb. Even if we reject Gartner’s estimate as over inflated, and suggest that companies produce just two copies of an invoice, with the average length being two to three pages (we’ll ignore any appendices), that’s five pages of hard copy per invoice saved, or 1.4 billion sheets of paper!

There is no hard and fast rule for the number of sheets of paper produced from a single tree, since different trees and different weights of paper need more or less volume of pulp (and wood fibre). The consensus is anywhere between 22,500 and 80,000 sheets of A4 copy paper per tree. What this means is that our customers, by reducing paper invoices, need between 17,500 to 62,000 fewer trees felled each year.

It makes for a convincing argument that using a solution for e-invoicing (sending invoices in PDF, XML, or image files) can lower paper consumption. However, the biggest environmental gains with e-invoicing come from reduced transport.In terms of carbon footprint, those 1.4 billion pages weigh in at between 6,000 and 7,000 tonnes. According to CEPI, the European organisation for the paper industry, every tonne of paper product uses 0.34 tonnes of CO2 (according to the CEPI Sustainability Report 2007).So for 7,000 tonnes of paper saved, that’s also more than 2,000 tonnes of CO2 saved per year. That’s a real tick in the box for the environment.

The business of going green

Intelligent document process automation can be seen as a funnel for all incoming business documents, beyond just invoices, no matter what the format. Optical recognition software is employed to create a virtual image of any document—paper, PDFs, tiffs, XML data, even detecting cursive handwriting. This technology takes the process beyond simple ‘scan to archive’, recognising a document rather than a stream of data, accurately receiving, indexing and saving the document and the data it contains.

By eliminating the physical handling of paper, most users see a productivity increase of 25 to 50 per cent. An important step in the paper-to-digital conversion is this ability to label and catalogue scanned documents. This labelling allows scanned documents to be searched, and so create an electronic workflow which is much faster than manual handling, especially if users are in different locations and time zones. Faster processing times will decrease late payment penalties and allow organisations to negotiate early-payment discounts.

Invoice automation is a true business sustainability solution, reducing paper waste. Will we achieve the dream of the paperless office? Probably not, and certainly not in the near future, because, despite the drive for organisations to be greener, we all still see a demand for hard copy in the office. Fortunately, invoice automation can equally deal with hard copy and electronic sources, enabling organisations to ease towards true sustainability with a hybrid approach in the first instance. What will push the adoption is that it really helps companies improve their bottom line: and this is just a small part of how introducing document management across a business can reap true rewards, both environmentally and through improved business agility.

Simon Shorthose is managing director of ReadSoft UK. Prior to joining ReadSoft he was vice president of Sales Europe at International Business Systems, an ERP software house, and was VP Sales and Marketing at Catalyst International, a US software company. He has also worked for major corporations such as Hays plc and Ocean Group (now DHL) in a number of commercial roles. He was also involved in a VC-backed IT start-up company in the telematics industry. www.readsoft.co.uk

This post was originally published: Sustainability: Paperless office | Business Excellence Magazine.

Get ready for the Cloud – Part 2

Get ready for the Cloud – Part 2

Companies know data is possibly the most valuable business tool they have.  Even companies that do not yet know how to use their data want to keep it so they can work out what to do with it later!  But because the volume of data being captured by companies is increasing, it is becoming harder to keep data on site. Cloud computing can help to solve this storage issue, providing an affordable means to store and access reams of business intelligence for use now or in the future.

This should generate business value.  By this we mean using your time to stay engaged with your customers. Cloud offers two ways to achieve this: through mobile and social engagement. While companies will be able to add social capabilities to cloud applications to bring a Facebook-style approach to communications with customers, it is the shift to mobile could well be the most powerful tool yet, especially for smaller companies that require real flexibility in their operations.

The trend for bringing your own device into work may already be coming more acceptable within medium and large businesses; but the real advantage of accessing apps from anywhere via smartphones, tablets, and notebooks is for SMEs. They can access their business tools from anywhere, so can be out dealing direct with customers, but still be able to access all the tools they need to keep the business operating.

Business at all levels is expected to embrace Cloud in its many forms within the coming year. At ReadSoft we have already embraced Cloud, recognising the flexibility it can deliver to the small to medium businesses, even if that company lacks a dedicated IT resource. ReadSoft Online is a simple way to integrate automatic data capture from documents, including supplier invoices, as a standalone solution, or integrated into a broader Cloud based infrastructure. Either way, we can use the Cloud to help businesses immediately bring their back office processes and automation online, transforming the collection, storage and management of paper and electronic documents.