It’s hard to imagine a world without email. Email was invented in the 1960’s for use by academia and government. Usage broadened and exploded in the 1980’s with the development of the internet. Since then, it has become ubiquitous, a part of everyday life with almost 5 billion accounts worldwide. Email is used by individual and businesses. It has supplanted snail mail and phone calls. Email is what makes ecommerce possible.
Power of an Email Address
While it is important to have key information on vendors and customers such as Taxpayer Identification Numbers (TINs) and other key master data, they all pale in comparison to the importance and power of an email address for accounting.
- An email address is a universally unique identity for an accounting department at a vendor or customer (ap@customer.com or ar@vendor.com). No one else in the world will have the same email address.
- With an email address you can communicate with any company or individual on the globe. It would be very surprising if a company or individual did not have an email address.
- An email address allows you to automate communications, go paperless and trigger workflows. It enables office automation, eliminates costly, inefficient manual processes and helps to accelerate collections and cash flow. All you need is an email address to use automation.
- An email address has the power to transform vendor and customer data management.
With an email address you can use automated credit and collection solutions including:
- Profile Management – Companies that practice Profile Management have clean and complete master data, more efficient operations and shorter Cash Conversion Cycles (CCCs).
- Onboarding Sequences– Successfully onboarding vendors and customers smooths transitions, and results in fewer operational problems and accelerated cash flow.
- Automated Vendor and Customer Communications – They enable more efficient, faster, and effective communication to facilitate your business processes and transactions.
- Self-Service Service Vendor and Customer Portals – Self-Service portals make it easy for your vendors and customers to do business with you. Your business partners want to self-manage their accounts, and you eliminate costly manual tasks. It’s a win-win situation.
Email is the single most important data you can have for accounting. Email addresses give you the power to go digital, be paperless and automate your accounting processes and communication. Automated credit and collection solutions make it possible to use email addresses to go paperless and optimize automation.
Lockstep Collect, a leader in cloud-based credit and collection platforms, can help you collect cash in 4 ways:
- Cloud-based solutions
- Automated vendor and customer communications
- Customer and vendor self-service
- Collections Activity Management
Lockstep Collect is an experienced software partner that can help you maximize your collections and cash flow in the new normal.
If you would like to learn more about how you can benefit from automated credit and collection solutions, please contact Lockstep Collect at www.lockstep.io.
