Much to be gained by automating business processes
Yet there is much to be gained by further automating your business. Consider, for instance, the registration of orders with iPad applications by your sales staff, stock administration with barcodes or the fully automatic digital sending of invoices. All this saves an enormous amount of time, reduces the risk of errors and increases the quality of your services.
The rise of fintech companies
I would also like to talk about another development here, and it is related to the coming to market of the many fintechs. As the word suggests, these are financial companies (not necessarily financiers) that use technology. In their risk analysis, these fintech companies use complex models that automatically input as much business data as possible. The whole process, from the start of the application to the KYC (Know Your Customer), customer acceptance and booking out the funding itself, is done entirely online. All this with as little human intervention as possible. For entrepreneurs, who, like me, grew up with banking account managers who remained the point of contact for years and to whom you could ask anything, this is a huge change. The human aspect falls away, but in return - if the system works well - an efficient and cost-effective financing product. This enables these fintech financiers to also provide smaller financing profitably. Something that helps SMEs in particular enormously. Especially now that general banks are still hardly able and willing to provide financing of less than €1 million.
Also automation of purchasing, inventory and receivables management
Another trend that requires more automation from the company, the borrower, is the following. More and more working capital financiers who focus on financing as high as possible for purchases, inventories and debtors are also trying to automate these processes. This starts with automatically pledging debtors with a link between the client's records and those of the lender. Where pledging and analysis of stocks by the funder are concerned, we are now also seeing the first steps to automate this. This is done via a platform that establishes a direct link with the client's stock records. Based on the information read in, the platform makes an analysis of the currentness of the stock. This is important for the level of financing. This includes issues such as age, turnover rate and which stock has been paid for and which has not. This provides not only the financier but also the entrepreneur with a deep insight into the quality of the stock.
The latter not only places heavy demands on the financier's level of automation, but obviously also on that of the company. A good integrated stock administration is just one of them. Fortunately, most modern financial packages like Exact, Microsoft Dynamics or SAP are prepared for this. Still, it is a good idea to have a talk with your external ICT company about this.
More information
If you want to know more about working capital financing, then Xolv Finance is the right place.
