Transforming Accounts Receivable

  • Digital billing management
  • Improving automation & efficiency
  • Creating satisfied customers

Objectives
This international car hire firm holds many corporate contracts where employees are at liberty to use a vehicle through any of the car hire company’s agencies, without having to raise and present an official purchase order.  This presents problems for the client’s finance department, as bills arrive with no purchase order attached, creating the need for numerous qualification phone calls, ultimately leading to under-satisfied clients.  A solution was required.

The Pitney Bowes solution
To address this problem, Pitney Bowes created an outsourced process that captured and digitised all hiring vouchers (all formats and signed by each driver) from the different client agencies. 

The document images and index are then cross referenced to a database supplied by the car hire company, updated weekly.  When the billing output printstream is sent to the car hire company, vouchers are associated with, and printed alongside, each bill.

As a result, the finance department receiving a bill can trace the relevant employee order and be assured that all orders are valid.

The outsourced process digitises all incoming documents, applies business management rules to each file, automatically associates each set of related documents, and inserts each set into the data exchange between Pitney Bowes and the car hire company and further inserts these case files into the client business process management systems.  An archive is also held to enable later query resolution.  The whole service handles over 6 million pages of documentation each year.

Results
Thanks to this global, integrated service, the car hire company has enhanced its view of corporate transactions, improved client satisfaction, significantly reduced the cost of query resolution and reduced time taken to settle customer payments.

Benefits of outsourced Customer Communications Management

  • Inbound billing of all types/channels processed, decision-ready, into a correct input format for internal accounts receivable systems.

  • Cost/resource reduction achieved through productivity and automation gains from digitised inbound document flow.

  • Improved billing settlement periods.

  • Enhanced customer satisfaction.


Client profile
This major car hire company, originating in Europe, now operates the world’s largest car rental network.  It covers 150 countries across the globe.