Modernizing Credit-to-Cash in a SaaS Environment

It has been around for a while, so why is Software as a Service (SaaS) becoming so popular now? If you ask 10 companies why they chose SaaS, you will probably get 10 different answers. However, the common theme will be that SaaS just makes sense. It is cost-effective, provides access to the most recent updates and is secure.

When companies first started offering SaaS environments, they had a great idea, but were way ahead of the infrastructure to truly support it. To successfully implement a SaaS environment, the costs were quite high. Those costs were then passed on to the customer. Now that SaaS has been around for a while, the infrastructure has caught up and the costs have significantly reduced. Solution providers can now offer a SaaS solution that is affordable to companies of all sizes. Budgeting for a SaaS solution is also simplified. A monthly subscription fee provides a predictable view of costs.

SaaS providers have teams dedicated to maintaining security 24/7. They should be partnering with some of the leading industry and government agencies to defend against cyberattacks and keep your information secure. Servers are kept up to date with the latest security patches removing another item from your very busy plate. You can focus your team on increasing cash flow instead of worrying about whether you have the right IT infrastructure in place to keep your company protected.

One of the greatest benefits of a SaaS environment is the ease at which you can implement the latest version of a solution. When you are hosting an application yourself, you have to budget for the upgrade and work through large amounts of regression testing to ensure that the updates you are installing do not impact your operations or other operations within your company.

With a SaaS environment, you are automatically on the most current version of a solution. Once the solution provider releases a new version to production, your environment is updated. This reduces the budget impact and you can rest assured that the newest functionality is at your fingertips. With a self-hosted solution, most companies have to wait one, two, three or more releases before they go through the upgrade process. If there is new functionality that they really need, they may upgrade more frequently, but it is generally a tough process to go through more than once a year.

Moving your credit and collections management to a SaaS environment simply makes sense. From a predictable cost perspective, a security perspective, and most certainly from the perspective of being able to take advantage of the latest and greatest functionality across collections, credit risk, dispute resolution/deduction management and cash application as soon as it is available. Companies that have modernized their credit-to-cash cycle have found that they can focus more of their time and resources on improving cash flow, while spending less time worrying about IT infrastructure when they moved to a SaaS environment.