Wells Fargo & Company (NYSE:WFC) announced today significant enhancements to the Receivables Manager service offered to Treasury Management customers. The industry-leading tool saves time and improves efficiency for accounts receivable departments. Receivables Manager now offers three distinct capabilities – remittance advice matching, ACH and wire repair, and an integrated receivables file– that together streamline and automate the receivables application and posting processes.
“As organizations received an increasing number of electronic payments over the last few years, we heard from our customers that this shift was creating inefficiencies,” said David Trotter, head of Treasury Management at Wells Fargo. “While payments arrived faster through ACH, the necessary information to process each payment was often buried in an email, or in some other system. Our new Receivables Manager tool dramatically reduces the number of transactions processed manually, which allows our customers to refocus their resources away from small repetitive tasks and onto more strategic priorities.”
With the shift from paper to digital transactions, what is efficient for payers is now inefficient for receivers. Currently, accounts receivable staff must search for remittance advices, connect them to payments, and then manually key information into accounting or Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems.
“We wanted to move our top accounts over to electronic payments to save money and increase efficiency,” said Patti Davis, accounts receivable manager from Carhartt. “Before Receivables Manager, it took about four to five days to post payments as complete. Now, because we don’t have to spend time matching ACH or wire payments to remittance and manually applying them, we take only 1.65 days to post payments as complete.”
Wells Fargo’s Receivables Manager addresses receivables challenges through:
- Remittance advice matching: The tool compares data from a customer’s ACH and wire payments to remittance information sent by email, faxes and paper mail. The engine for this matching process works based on a customer’s matching criteria, such as payer name, payer account and dollar amount.
- ACH and wire repair: Whenever possible, on occasions where payers include electronic information that is incomplete or unreadable, Wells Fargo’s new tool will fix the information systematically to enable automated cash application to the customer’s accounts receivable system. . When it is unfixable, customers can use the Receivables Manager application on the CEO portal to create remittance templates for payers so that subsequent payments can pass through automatically.
- Integrated receivables file: This feature consolidates payment and remittance information from many payment types. Customers can use the consolidated payment information to automatically post many types of received payments to their accounts receivable system.
Following a successful pilot phase, the enhanced Receivables Manager service is now available to Wells Fargo’s CEO customers.
