NetSuite Order to Cash process

Table of Contents

What’s an order to cash process?

Every company has a unique process of earning revenue. For an eCommerce business, it means selling products on their website or a third-party vendor, getting the cash from the consumer and ensuring that it gets delivered to them. In layman’s terms, this is the order-to-cash cycle of an eCommerce company.

For Manufacturers, this cycle can be a little different, where the invoicing process might occur after the order fulfillment. As this is a complex process, companies spend a lot of time managing their order-to-cash cycle. This often leads to the use of multiple business management systems that only hinder the process furthermore.

To break it down, an order-to-cash cycle generally contains the following items:

  1. An Order Entry
  2. Order Fulfillment
  3. Product Shipping
  4. Billing & Invoicing
  5. Payment Collection
  6. Reporting & Reconciling
  7. Accounts Receivable / Accounts Payables

When it comes to a business, not everyone follows the exact flow that is mentioned above. Every order-to-cash cycle can be unique, and it is NetSuite’s amazing capability that allows them to be automated for better results.

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The need for a NetSuite Order-To-Cash process

A well-planned order-to-cash cycle allows businesses to forecast their revenue, track sales and enhance inventory item management. However, any type of error can vastly affect the efficiency of the cycle and damage your entire forecasting data while delaying the fulfillment process.

As the order to cash cycle contains the work of different departments, it is common to see businesses opt for specialized systems that cater to a particular department be it internal or external, exclusively. As a result, companies soon find themselves amidst increased IT costs, misplaced data and delayed orders as no system is integrated with one another.

The solution? Accelerate and unify your order-to-cash cycle with a single business management system that is capable of handling every business department with ease aka NetSuite

Following are some major concerns that generally revolve around businesses looking to ease their order-to-cash cycle.

A complex Order Management Process

From Product Sale to Order Approval to Processing and all the way to fulfillment, the order management process tends to be complex and any issue at any time means risking customer satisfaction.

To explain: A CRM system is generally used by the Sales Department where they input every customer interaction, transaction, orders etc. However, an employee who oversees the warehouse tends to use a WMS to handle its operations. Both these departments run operations that are completely unique to them with no integration whatsoever.

What this means: If a sale is completed, the sales team must manually email the warehouse team of the order as they use different systems to manage their operations and that is just one instance.

The use of multiple business management systems increases the manual workload unnecessarily. Therefore, it is recommended to use an ERP like NetSuite which can easily connect all departments for streamlined operations. Be it WMS, CRM or even HCM, NetSuite is capable to handle it all.

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Unreliable data

The use of multiple business management systems affects a company’s reliability as needed information tends to be scattered all over. When someone updates information such as customer name, address, phone number etc. manually in their CRM, they must also make sure that the change gets reflected across every system in place.

The issue? If the new information doesn’t get updated, chances are the other department such as shipping, may send the product to the old address in the system. Yet another reason to use a unified cloud-based business management system.

A complex Order Management Process

From Product Sale to Order Approval to Processing and all the way to fulfillment, the order management process tends to be complex and any issue at any time means risking customer satisfaction.

To explain: A CRM system is generally used by the Sales Department where they input every customer interaction, transaction, orders etc. However, an employee who oversees the warehouse tends to use a WMS to handle its operations. Both these departments run operations that are completely unique to them with no integration whatsoever.

What this means: If a sale is completed, the sales team must manually email the warehouse team of the order as they use different systems to manage their operations and that is just one instance.

The use of multiple business management systems increases the manual workload unnecessarily. Therefore, it is recommended to use an ERP like NetSuite which can easily connect all departments for streamlined operations. Be it WMS, CRM or even HCM, NetSuite is capable to handle it all.

Unreliable data

The use of multiple business management systems affects a company’s reliability as needed information tends to be scattered all over. When someone updates information such as customer name, address, phone number etc. manually in their CRM, they must also make sure that the change gets reflected across every system in place.

The issue? If the new information doesn’t get updated, chances are the other department such as shipping, may send the product to the old address in the system. Yet another reason to use a unified cloud-based business management system.

Automate your Manual Processes, it’s 2021

Data entry is a time-consuming process and those wide excel rows often are filled with plenty of errors. A billing process that requires manual printing and dispatch of the invoice can become a stressor for the order-to-cash cycle as the process can take 5-10 days or more.

Automating these processes means saving those amounts of days for other work

With NetSuite, you can send invoices automatically once the order is fulfilled or send notifications at every step of the order process.

NetSuite ERP, a unified database

NetSuite is currently ranked as the #1 cloud-based business management solution, thanks to its strong process automation and integration capabilities which reduce manual work.

As NetSuite operates on a unified database, operations tend to happen in harmony. For instance, with NetSuite, a sales rep can check product inventory before creating a work order whereas the same work order can be sent to the Distribution team in a matter of seconds. On the other hand, if you need to use a different system, NetSuite can easily integrate it, so all information becomes sharable once again.