Key Lead-to-Cash Billing Functions

Lead-to-Cash Functions

Payments & Payment Allocation Against Invoices

The primary difference between the lead-to-invoice and lead-to-cash deployment methods is the process of payment collections within Salesforce Billing. Rich customer account information helps businesses track payment methods and different payment types, allowing flexibility whether the customer is paying through credit, debit, ACH, or check. Native integrations with leading payment processors allow finance teams to schedule recurring payment runs to pay off invoice balances in full and automatically. Advanced AR provides flexible line-level allocation, which awards further precision to the collection process. Users can accomplish all these tasks through a simple point and click interface, all without leaving Salesforce Billing.

Invoice Adjustments and Refunds

Adjustments are changes to a customer’s accounts receivable or balance. Salesforce Billing offers flexibility for managing adjustments, such as the addition of a fee or applying a credit against an invoice. Adjustments also come from service cancellation and error correction. All of these adjustments change invoice balances, and managing them in multiple systems is often a highly manual and error-prone process. Within lead-to-cash, Salesforce Billing users can apply credits and debits and allocate them appropriately to individual invoice lines to increase or decrease the balance. Salesforce automates the crediting process when canceling an invoice and gives finance teams the ability to manually create and allocate credit and debit notes for one-off scenarios. Applying these adjustments to existing Salesforce Billing invoice data helps curb errors and package AR data for handoff to the ERP system.

Accounts Receivable (AR)

Accounts Receivables represents the cash owed to a business for goods and services they provided their customers. AR increases as goods and services are delivered and decreases after payment for those services. Accurate AR relies on billing and financial management systems to closely align, since bills generated from the billing engine directly impact receivables. Without alignment, companies risk overstating or understating how much their customers owe jeopardizing the relationship with the customer and creating challenges for forecasting future costs and revenue.

AR in Salesforce Billing includes the aggregation of posted open invoice balances against posted unapplied payments, credit notes, and debit notes. Salesforce Billing provides custom reporting functionality that provides a point-in-time view of an AR balance on an account. Salesforce Billing also provides flexible custom report functionality that can be configured to meet specific business requirements. When you use payments and adjustments, Salesforce Billing becomes the source record for all invoice balance information, then and passes it down to the ERP for GL and financial reporting. As a best practice, we recommend integrating Salesforce Billing with a more robust ERP system for in-depth AR reporting general ledger posting, and custom subledger posting.

Collections & Dunning Notifications

Collection activities occur when a customer’s invoice balance is past-due. Businesses need to define thresholds to begin collection activities and also define the different metrics to trigger collection attempts. Dunning is one of the possible processes within collections for communicating demands for collecting payment on past-due invoice balances. Salesforce Billing allows for two types of collection processes.

• Light Collections: Processes aimed at decreasing past-due balances by collecting payments and decreasing bad debt. Dunning includes lightweight automation and configuration together with using balance snapshots and custom reports.
• Heavy Collections: Includes the same objectives as light collections, but also replaces robust ERP and FMS. Heavy collections include customizations required for purpose-built screens for complex financial operations processes like write-off, collections, treatments, and late fee management.

Use the combination of invoice data and powerful automation tools to build custom dunning processes within Salesforce Billing. These processes help financial departments streamline customer interactions and track outstanding past-due invoice balances for further analysis. Salesforce Billing’s lead-to-cash flow easily rolls this information back up to the customer account, ensuring a complete view of customer touch-points.