Cash Application Management

Cash Application provides Customer Recommendations feature to identify the customer from the bank statement whenever a payment is received from the bank. It provides the user with the ability to maintain customer mappings.

Information Customer Recommendations button is configurable.

Customer Recommendations provides recommendations on five different modules:

MICR Mapping

When a payment is received, the bank statement has information of the customer such as Routing Number and Account Number. Cash Application provides the MICR Mapping feature to identify the customers based on the payments consisting of the MICR. It provides recommendations for MICR mappings based on the past actions of the Analyst during exception handling.

Payer Name Mapping

When a bank statement is received from the client, apart from information such as Account Number and Routing Number, it also has the payer name.

The Payer Name Mapping feature gives a recommendation based on the past exception handling patterns where it maps the customer name to its alias. The user has the capability to review the payer name mappings and add them to the master list. This ensures that all subsequent payments from this particular payer automatically have the customer identified.

Customer Group Mapping

The relationship between the customers can be maintained in the following three ways:

Alternate Payer

Alternate Payer is the grouping of customers where, only the parent can make a payment on behalf of the child customers.

Flat Inverse

Flat Inverse is a grouping of customers where any one of the related customers can make the payment for any other set of customers. For example, if customers A1, A2 and A3 are related, then any one of the customers can make the payment on behalf of others.

Customer Grouping

When there are one or more business locations of the same customers doing business with the client, the invoices are maintained separately for each customer. For example, if there are customers A, A1, A2, and A3. A relationship is maintained between them to identify a customer on the payments when there are cross customer payments. Based on the past exception handling patterns, the system provides recommendations for any of the customer groupings, as applicable.

The screen displays the customer details and the corresponding mapping details, such as:

Customer Name: The name of the customer.

Customer Number: The unique number assigned to the customer.

Company Code: The company code assigned to the customer.

Source System: The client's ERP.

Account Number: The customer's account number.

Review Status: The status of the recommendations, such as, approved, ignored, and so on.

Payments: A link to the list of payments under a particular recommendation is provided in this column.

Payment Count: Number of payments based on which the particular recommendation is provided.

You can also view the status of the recommendations under the View drop-down menu.

There are four statuses available:

• Pending: Displays the recommendations that are to be viewed and taken action upon

• Approved: Displays the recommendations approved by the user using the Approve button

• Ignored: Displays the recommendations ignored by the user using the Ignore button

• Pending Review: Displays the recommendations that are not approved or ignored but were marked as reviewed by the users

Information The default status in the View drop-down menu is displayed as pending.

The user can perform the following actions based on the generated customer recommendations:

Approve, Ignore, or Mark as Reviewed.

Customer Recommendations have the following two features:

• Comments - While ignoring or marking the recommendations as reviewed, an optional field to add comments is displayed. The added comments are stored against each of the recommendations acted upon. The user can check the provided comments by selecting the option from the View drop-down menu.

• Auto-approval - The users can set the minimum threshold value for auto-approval of recommendations using the Set Threshold button. Setting up the threshold will automatically turn the auto-approval feature on for the respective module. This feature will automatically add the qualified recommendations to the backend master data if there are no conflicts. For example, if the user provides the threshold value as 10, then all the recommendations will be automatically approved on reaching the payment count of 10 . The threshold can be set at each module level, that is, MICR, Payer Name, and so on.

Viewing History in Customer Recommendation

The View History button under the Customer Recommendation screen will allow the customer view the history of actions performed on that screen.

For example, if a customer recommendation was approved by user A 10 days ago and rejected by user B after 5 days, the user with the View History button access can view this information.

To access this feature, follow these steps:

1. In the Customer Recommendation Menu screen, select the Customer Recommendation and click View History.

   

   The View History window is displayed.

   

If payments have been made but customers have not confirmed the remittance information, the Analyst must either add invoices for each payment or contact the customer offline. The following Cash Application features help the Analyst in handling such exceptions:

Remittance Prediction

In cases where a customer made a payment but did not provide the remittance information, the Analyst manually adds invoices against each of the payments.

Instead of adding invoices manually one after the other, Cash Application provides the Remittance Prediction feature, where the system tries to predict the invoices to which the payment belongs based on the past patterns of the customers. This feature leverages our machine learning model platform - Rivana. The customer can validate the information from the pre- defined subset created by the system.

Features of Remittance Prediction:

• The top three predictions will be displayed.

• The predictions are sorted on the basis of highest probability.

• On expanding the subset, one or more invoices which belong to the particular payment are displayed.

This saves the Analyst’s time on manual exception handling.

Email Customer for Remittance

There are scenarios where payment is made by the customer, but the remittance information has not been sent by the customer. In such cases, the Analyst has to reach out to the customer through offline channels. To ease out the process of collecting information from the customer, Cash Application provides a portal to collaborate with your customers, where they can login and submit the remittances. Additionally, there is a guest flow, where a customer can submit remittances without logging into the portal. Using this feature, an automated email is sent to all the customers who did not submit the remittance information.

• If there are any contacts available it will be displayed in the panel.

• If a contact is not present in the list, the same can be added using the 'To' field on the window and this email ID will be automatically added to the contact list for the future.

Cash Application provides the following features for exception handling:

Payment Worklist

To work on multiple payments at a time, you need to open each payment one by one and then work on it. But, using this feature, you can create a worklist of payments that need to be worked upon and work on them one after the other, by navigating across payments. This option is available both on the Payments and Payment Batches tab.

You can perform the following actions using this feature:

• Create a Worklist out of all the selected payments to work on more than one payment at a time.

• Perform exception handling on payments, one after the other.

• Instead of manually selecting the list of payments that must be worked upon, the user can filter the list of payments and select/ deselect it.

Information The payment worklist will be created in the order in which the payments are sorted on the Payments screen.

 

Note This feature can be configured upon request. Contact our customer value team to enable this.

Bulk Edit

In the received data, the user can view only 20 invoices at a time in the grid at a time. In case the remittance has large number of invoices, it is not possible to display all the invoices on the same page. The Bulk Edit feature allows you to view/modify large number of invoices on the same page.

You can perform the following actions in the Bulk Edit window:

• add items to the grid

• delete items from the grid

• delete all items from the grid

• refresh

• select invoices

• add invoice

• save the data

• transform the data

• clear filter

Following are some of the Bulk Edit options available:

Validations- When there is more data in the check captured remittance information, this function can be used to simplify the search and find where the capture failed.

Using this feature, you can perform the following actions:

• Search for all the wrongly captured alpha numeric values.

• Search for all the wrongly captured non text values.

• List all the duplicate items together.

Edit Actions- This function is used to perform actions on a bulk data.

Using this feature, you can perform the following actions:

• Apply a prefix to all the selected data.

• Apply a postfix to all the selected data.

• Trim the characters from the beginning of the selected cells.

• Trim the characters from the end.

• Find a character/ number and replace it with some other character/ number.

AR Link

A customer can mention any reference number, such as Invoice Number, Purchase Order Number, and so on, for the invoices they have paid for. The reference number points to an invoice record in open invoices. The system matches it across all the reference number available on the invoice and generates it. To validate the data, the Analyst will search the reference numbers against all the fields in the Invoice tab. To ease out the Analyst’s workload, the AR Link feature can be used.

Using the AR Link feature the users can view the criteria based on which field in the open AR the particular line item is matched.

The link under the AR Details column displays all the invoice related details from the AR extract.

Cash Application provides the following ways to assign exceptions:

Payment Locking

In cases where multiple analysts are working on an exception, it could happen that the same payment is worked upon by multiple analysts which leads to wasted effort and overriding of updates. In order to avoid this, we introduced the Payment Locking feature.

Using this feature, a payment when assigned to a particular user will not be allowed to be worked upon by another user till the payment is assigned to him/ her.

You can perform the following three actions, once you click the payment:

• Assign the payment to yourself.

• View the payment but cannot make changes to it.

• Cancel the action.

The prerequisite for this feature is that the assignment of payment should be done to your payments.

Payment Assignment

If there are multiple payments to work, it must be assigned to users for exception handling. The Payment Assignment feature allows you to assign payments to users for exception handling, which could be automated based on a few criteria set up in the system.

You can perform the following actions on the payments:

• Assign payments to yourself.

• Assign specific users to a payment.

• Unassign the user from a payment.

This feature is used by an administrator to assign the payment exceptions in a batch to the users within a work team.

The Analytics platform compiles a wide range of information and represents the data graphically. With Analytics, you can find critical information compiled at one place in the form of Reports and Dashboards. This allows you to analyse the various activities taking place in your account. You can use the information in the reports to monitor trends over a period of time and take action as required to improve performances.

Dashboards - Focus on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and provide concise at-a-glance representation of complex data sets. Dashboards use multiple types of graphs and tables to make the data more visual and comprehensive to make it more interactive.

The Payment Automation Report Dashboard in the Cash Application displays an analysis of the following:

• Header Automation Rate

• Item Automation Rate

• Exception and Non-Exception payments