When automating your cash application process, speed is foremost on your mind. The faster you get payments matched, the faster your business can use that cash. So, when you’re shopping for vendors, your primary interest will be the automatic match rate that each vendor promises you’ll achieve with their software.
Vendors may highlight a line-item match rate or an envelope match-rate. But cash application is too complex and varied a process for those two numbers to be all the explanation you need.
That’s why Billtrust is thrilled to roll out the newest addition to our analytics workspace: the Cash Application Analytics Dashboard. It’s a fast, user-friendly, self-service reporting dashboard that is available to all Billtrust Cash Application users (and complements our Payments dashboard). It promises to deliver more insight into the numbers and processes behind the line-item and envelope match rate, and help you better engage with customers to improve your cash application process.
The dashboard tracks overall matching performance across multiple categories and allows you to drill down into statistics around individual customers, payment methods and time spans.
Let’s dig into how it works.
The big picture
The first thing you’ll see when you open your Billtrust Cash Application Analytics Dashboard are a series of graphs and dropdown menus. You’ll see the Envelope Auto Match Rate, Envelope Volume, Payments Processed, Line Item Auto Match Rate and Line Item Volume.
There’s a lot that you can do with this big picture level of data including breaking down any of these top-level metrics by time-span and configuring the way that the data is displayed.
This is great for reporting and getting a sense of momentum over time. But if you want to see how your Billtrust Cash Application solution is working (and how it compares to competitors), you must drill down into the matching data.
The ingredients of your line item match rate
The line item match rate is one of the two main statistics that vendors tout when selling you on their cash application solutions. But different vendors classify the ingredients of the line item match rate in different ways, making them hard to compare.
Billtrust is prepared to give it to you straight and show you exactly what is happening with your line item match rate. Our AI-powered matching engine delivers market-leading match rates and improves over time. That’s why we’re excited to show you what’s under the hood!
We first break it down into two categories: Touchless Match and Assisted Match Rates.
Touchless Match is exactly what it sounds like, these are the matches made automatically by the system – line items that were extracted and matched with a provided Open Balance line item and then exported to your ERP. This rate is of enormous value. The more Touchless Matches that you have, the less time your team is spending on manual work. Our development and implementation teams put an enormous amount of effort into delivering your company high levels of Touchless Matches right from the start.
In the Assisted Match Rates category, we have several distinct sub-categories users can quickly and easily use to make a match:
Change ID: The user edited the line item within our system to make a match.
Multi-select: Ability to easily select multiple line items from the open balance to a single payment amount for a quick match.
Quick Pick: The Billtrust Cash Application exception-handling engine displayed the top 10 suggested matches for a line item which was then selected by the user.
Single Select: Search was utilized by the user to find and select the proper match. (Note: when users search and select matches, Cash Application’s artificial intelligence engine updates its confidence scoring model, making auto matches more likely in the future.)
Understanding how many assisted matches you’re getting, what kind of assistance they require and which customers they are coming from can help inform you which customers might need some attention around how they pay you. And it helps your Billtrust reps make sure that we’re delivering the highest levels of service and make any necessary adjustments to your configuration.
Understanding your envelope match rate
This is the other big one. In some ways, the envelope match rate can give you more useful information than the line item match rate because it can show you how different customers’ payments are performing as a whole.
The envelope match rate refers to the auto match success of every line item within a single payment (envelope).
Here again, we are able to break this down into multiple sub-categories:
Auto match: All line items in the envelope are a 100% match. This is the goal of every cash application solution and where the ROI is the highest for your team.
Manual match: No line items for the payment were auto matched. This could be an indication of bad remittances. This stat will indicate the buyers you should work with to achieve better remittance with their payments.
Partial auto match: At least one item was matched within the envelope. This statistic is a good one to look at over time. Billtrust Cash Application’s AI engine learns over time and so you should see your Partial auto matches decrease and your Auto matches increase. This will be an area of interest for your Billtrust rep as well.
Payment only: Payment was received with no supporting documentation. You can use this stat to develop a list of customers to contact and encourage to send better remittance data.
Make your cash app data work for your
With the Cash Application Analytics Dashboard, you can drill down and level up your data with ease. You can create and export detailed tables, or get a quick glance at KPIs on match rates, match volumes and total payments processed.
You can make charts with customized intervals, metrics, and metric breakdowns and then create secondary charts to compare metrics against each other.
You’ll have an unprecedented look into the state of your cash application process.
Cash Application reimagined
Now you know what to look for when shopping for a cash application solution. Make sure to differentiate touchless from assisted stats when comparing line item and envelope match rates. And look for an automated platform with a powerful and easy to use dashboard.
If you’ve got questions, we’d love to answer them. Click the button below and fill out the contact form. A cash application expert from Billtrust will be in contact soon.
Let’s work together to move finance forward.
Talk to an expert today!