As a manager working in an organization, you may often ask yourself, how can I manage all my expenses? And more importantly, how can I keep track of every dollar that I spend? There are many good answers to those questions, but today vendor management with the help of Payment Readiness will be the solutions to your problems. Moreover, they are the 97th reason to go beyond Telecom Expense Management!
What is Payment Readiness?
Payment Readiness is one of the newest sections of the Cimpl platform, which you can find in the billing center. In there, providers are set up to be available for payment follow-ups and this feature enables you to track all your billing accounts as well as the associated invoices amounts. There are three main actions you can take on your payments thanks to this feature: pay in full, pay partially or hold the payment. Also, here are other things you can do in this section:
- View Account Details in a grid.
- Filter and search through payment records;
- Confirm a payment record;
- Set the payment status to Hold;
- View the history for a payment in the Activity tab; and
- Export data from any grid.
Pretty cool, right? Using a feature like this could make dealing with all your provider-related costs so much easier. And that, could make running your business as easy as ABC.
What is vendor management?
Normally, companies, especially large ones, must work with many different vendors. And all those vendors could have different contracts, terms, billing dates, points of contact and pay rates. So how can a company keep up with so many variables? Well, they can simply work with a vendor manager. Gartner defines Vendor Management in its IT glossary as “a discipline that enables organizations to control costs, drive service excellence and mitigate risks to gain increased value from their vendors throughout the deal life cycle.” With a good and effective vendor management process in place, you could do so many things, like properly establish service, quality, cost and satisfaction goals. You could also choose and then manage third-party suppliers that will help you achieve those business goals.
Like anything in life sadly, there are some challenges associated with vendor management. If the process is not implemented correctly, here are some things you could have to deal with, according to Zycus, a global provider of complete Source-to-Pay suite of procurement performance solutions:
- Vendor Compliance Risk – If you don’t choose the right vendors, they may not be able to meet your organizational standards.
- Vendor Reputation Risk – Some vendors may give out a poor performance and mess up your deadlines.
- Lack of Visibility – A whole lot of vendors can mean a whole lot of elements to sort out.
- Vendor Data Storage – Without a vendor management system, you could have a hard time dealing with multiple vendors for multiple projects at the same time.
- Vendor Payment Risk – Different payment terms equals the possibility of issues regarding paying on time.
I just showed you the good and the not so good sides of vendor management and you may wonder what you are supposed to do with that information. Well, let me show you.
How does Payment Readiness fit in with vendor management?
Now that you know what specific tasks you can achieve with the Payment Readiness tool, what else can you gain from using something like this? You can make vendor management easier. Indeed, as a customer, you get to pick and choose which suppliers are the best for your company and add them to the section. With a tool like Payment Readiness, all your invoices from all your suppliers are set up in a grid, giving you so much more visibility into your expenses. You can also search and filter through your payments either by provider, by invoice period or by payment details, meaning that you will know how much money you owe, to who and most importantly, when.
Do you want to learn more about how you could start using the Payment Readiness tool? Contact us. Oh, and by the way, lack of visibility or potentially late payments are not the only challenges you have to deal with when you own a large company. You could also have to deal with Shadow IT, which are the IT systems built and used within organizations without the explicit approval of the organization. Read our blog on Shadow IT to learn more about how to leverage it.