The effective management of a company’s revenue is an important way to also manage growth and become successful, according to Entrepreneur’s James Stephenson. Knowing how cash flows in and out of a company’s accounts may not necessarily require an advanced degree in accounting or business but it does require some knowledge on how a company gets paid and when those revenues are received.
There are many different financial tools available to companies, large or small, that provide business owners with the answer to corporate revenue management needs without the necessity of a large IT enterprise infrastructure or the need to invest in expensive proprietary software. Here are 4 tools for managing a company’s revenue (in general terms) that should be considered. These include: convergent rating and billing, financial accounts management, online banking tools, and sweep accounts.
Convergent Rating and Billing
Convergent rating and billing, common to telecommunications and mobile communications, involves the use of prepaid and postpaid payment methods and the management of multiple service (such as voice, data and media). The use of a convergent rating and billing platform allows companies to ensure payment for the services provided by performing routine audits on customer’s account balances prior to the delivery of services. The platform enables a company to get paid for the services they provide as well as assist customers by alerting them when their balances are low or insufficient for the service they seek. This type of platform also reduces the reliance on multiple billing systems and the need to send unpaid items out for collection, thus maximizing a company’s revenues per transaction.
Financial Accounts Management
One area that every business owner should become more knowledgeable in with respect to revenue management is that of a financial accounting system. As a business owner, regardless of size, it’s difficult to manage multiple accounts across an existing billing and ledger system, each with their own negotiated set of terms with respect to accounts receivable, billing and invoicing. As a business grows, it makes sense to use a central point for capturing information about all customer accounts, their activity, and an understanding of how revenue flows into each one of them. A simple example of this is a platform that consolidates information regarding credit cards, bank statements, and investments into one web-based platform for monitoring.
Online Banking Tools
According to Duncan Rolph, managing partner of an investment advisory firm, financial institutions may provide tools that many businesses may not be aware of that help manage the intricacies of commercial bank accounts. It may also be beneficial to consider the advantages of using an online version of a traditional banking platform. With web based banking experience, business owners have the ability to check balances, manage their spending, perform deposits, and use automatic teller machines to access cash without having to physically visit a bank branch.
Sweep Accounts
Many companies don’t pay close enough attention to the extra change that comes after a sale is made. Having a system in place to capture those extra pennies and maintain an accounting of them to be swept into an interest bearing account may be something of value for a growing business. There are web-based platforms that can help companies find their loose change and bank it in order to sweep those cents into dollars. This “piggy banking” helps maximize the efficiency of a company’s revenue in order to build an investment portfolio and create an additional source of income.