Cash flow management / AP&AR softwares and solutions

searcher profile

June 03, 2024

by a searcher from INSEAD in Toronto, ON, Canada

Hi! People who recently bought a company. Do you typically use Excel or specific software to manage AP&AR and optimize cash flow? If software, which one?

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commentor profile
Reply by a professional
from University of Pennsylvania in New York, NY, USA
Hi everyone. I'm a former CFO with firm conviction that bill.com actually costs companies more money than it saves them. Because of its tactical nature, approvers tend to have false confidence that because a prior person approved a bill, they should approve it too. This leads to lots of overspending and waste not getting caught. BILL also doesn't provide any analytics in their platform - so if your AWS spend is up 18% MoM, it doesn't tell you why. Approvers are just presented with the current month's spend - with no context. I'm biased - but i think Glean.ai is a much better tool for managing vendor spend and cash flow. The platform provides rich analytics, down to the line-item level, on every bill, and also has more accounting automations than BILL. Let me know if you'd like a demo of the platform.
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Reply by a professional
from University of Houston in Houston, Texas 77002, États-Unis
My suggestion... use Excel for cashflow until you get comfortable with the biz. You risk subscribing to and building out a tool that may not work for you.

Start building history today, in Excel, to determine your large inflow/outflow buckets that can help as you begin to forecast out.

Building solid connections with your team (collections / inventory management or key spenders) is the best way for this to succeed. You can rely on reports, but without the on the ground knowledge, it'll be useless or inaccurate. For example, your AR aging might show a large cash payment due, but your collections / AR team may know the customer's payment pattern. So you'll want to build that knowledge into your model and try to capture non-system driven activity.
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