At Spaulding Ridge, we’re dedicated to helping our clients maximize their investment in Quote-to-Cash applications. With user engagement and process efficiency as the top drivers for client success, we continuously refine the way we implement new processes and technology for our clients’ Sales, Operations and Finance user groups. We’ve successfully helped our clients across various industries solve challenges to nuances that make their business and/or industry unique.
Quote-to-Cash, often abbreviated as “QTC” or “Q2C”, is the makeup of processes by which an organization engages with their customers to prepare and present a proposal, negotiate terms and conditions of an agreement, send an invoice for the products or services delivered, and collect payment (i.e. “cash”) for all services rendered over a given period of time. For organizations who are embracing digital transformation as the catalyst for their business’ growth, QTC process and technology transformation should be the foundation of their roadmap.
In this blog series, we’ll be calling on our Quote-to-Cash experts here at Spaulding Ridge to highlight their experiences helping our clients’ business user groups improve their daily workflows, solved by our partners’ technology platform solutions. We will isolate specific technology solutions that continue to successfully address our clients’ head-scratching business process and organizational team silo challenges.
A robust, integrated Quote-to-Cash solution informs the sell-side of your business with clean revenue data for three fundamental financial metrics: Forecasted Revenue, Booked Revenue, and Billed Revenue.
Clean forecasted revenue data allows for decisions to be made in the sales planning process based on accurate information. Because forecasted revenue figures are volatile in nature, ensuring that users are creating reliable data in your systems every day is pivotal for success in this area.
Clean bookings data (a purchase order, work order, signed contract, etc.) paints a picture of closed revenue amounts. This data is crucial for informing your fulfillment/provisioning systems with accurate information on what to send to the customer, as well as telling as your billing engine what to do upon delivery of products and services. If there is any room for error in the data sent to 1) the system(s) that distribute your products and services, or 2) your billing system that sends out invoices for products or services rendered, it will inevitably result in a negative experience for your customers.
Clean billing data is paramount for obvious reasons. Invoices sent to your customers with incorrect totals will result in lost revenue and can hinder the revenue recognition process, introducing risk to compliance with ASC 606. Erroneous invoices will also naturally create headaches with payment collection, requiring time spent on manual true-up for a process that should be fully automated.
Once data architecture structures are in place, customer data will be collected over time that opens up the doors to implement more sophisticated reporting strategies leveraging technologies such as predicative analytics and machine learning. These technologies can enlighten sellers with a deeper understanding of customer behaviors to drive various sales techniques. For example, Propensity-to-Buy (P2B) modeling can be achieved by enabling intelligent systems with historical proposed, booked and billed customer data to instantly provide your Sales teams with easily understood visuals that depict buyer tendencies. In turn, the customer is targeted with more enticing offers, increasing the chances of closing more deals.
Our clients engage Spaulding Ridge because they trust us to solve their business issues. We help our clients discover, realize and implement connected technology solutions enable transparent business process among front, middle and back office system users.
Founded in 2018, Spaulding Ridge is a top management consulting firm, dedicated to client success and helping organizations implement and adopt best-in-cloud technology to solve their most pressing challenges. We provide the office of the CFO financial clarity to Sales and Operational complexity by integrating financial and sales SaaS Platforms.
We help:
• Finance gain control ” Increasing financial effectiveness, insight and impact
• Sales increase Productivity ” Hitting quota more quickly, consistently and efficiently
• Operations increase Competitiveness ” Through productivity rates, customer service outcomes, and efficiency
