Video: Give your ERP a Forward-Looking View: Automated Cash Management & Forecasting | Duration: 2276s | Summary: Give your ERP a Forward-Looking View: Automated Cash Management & Forecasting

Transcript for "Give your ERP a Forward-Looking View: Automated Cash Management & Forecasting": And we are live. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to this webinar between Web Control and AduCap, focusing on the product gap that AGICAP fills for ERP systems. I'm joined here this morning by James Hessilden, MD over at web control, to run you through this webinar where we'll be digging into exactly that and giving a quick demo of how AccuCap complements the existing ERP landscape today. So we'll just wait a couple of minutes for a few people to join. In my experience, webinars are not always joined at full capacity on time, so usually makes sense, just to wait a bit. And then we'll get to it. I'm assuming that was all clear, by the way. James, can you I know everyone can hear me. I heard you well. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's the start. That's a good start. Alright. Let's just give it 30 seconds more, and then we can kind of get into it. Okay. Great. Thanks, Jake. That's useful to confirm. So, for those of you joining, I'll just quickly introduce myself up front. I'm guessing, most of you know James, but he, can also introduce himself, to the people that I invited. And then, we can get started into exactly what AGCap does, answer that question of where AGCap fits into the ERP landscape, and then get into the exciting bit, which is, the AGGI Cap demo. So for myself, it says Nathaniel on the screen here, but most people call me Nat. I head up the partnerships team here at AGCap UK, which really involves working with businesses like web control, to, partner where companies need, a cash flow forecasting or cash management solution, to complement, their ERP landscape. Also working with private equity funds, accountancies, and interim CFOs, where they have cash specific projects. James, do you wanna say a little bit about yourself? Yeah. Sure. I'm the managing director here at Web Control. Web Control have been working with ERP systems since 2,001. We primarily look after a couple of legacy systems. So we're, experts within that kind of structured programming language. And, obviously, about 5 years ago, we became an Alliance partner to NetSuite, where we have, that's an obvious growth as a as a company and where our future lies as a company as well. So, my role in that is actually supporting NetSuite salespeople primarily in the emerging mid market for manufacturing wholesale distribution companies, and then us implementing them on on behalf of NetSuite. So I'm very much involved in the sales cycle at the beginning of this and and scoping and understanding what businesses need. So having a good understanding of what all the partners out there in the in the NetSuite landscape can do is something that I'm I'm very keen to to do. And we've obviously worked with AdiCap in the past as well. So so I think it's really interesting what you guys are doing, so very much important for our customers to understand that. Great. Thanks. And, yeah, super important to say upfront that, NetSuite is also one of AdiCap's, top growth markets, it's where we see some of the best collaboration in the mid market space, between our own solution, and the NetSuite solution via our API with NetSuite. So for those of you that don't know AGI Cap on the call, I'll just, present a quick intro, into what we did, what we did, what we do, because we're still alive, and who we are. So AduCap is a French company founded in 2016 back in Lyon in, Southeast in France. Over the last 8 years, AduCap has expanded to 12 different countries but offices in 6. We've got over 8,000 clients and, a 150 commercial and technology partners, including web control. In terms of what we do and where we fit into the broader ecosystem. AGCap is the market leader for cash flow management according to g 2. For those of you that don't know, g 2 is, the top software comparison site, that can be used to assess, what's what solutions make most sense for you to buy when you're looking at solving particular business problems. AGCap, ranks in the top right hand corner here based on customer satisfactions. That's customer reviews on the g two website of edge cap software and also market penetration. So our ability to implement, with a range of ERP solutions, also banks and cover different markets. So what does our platform do? I think for anyone coming to edge cap for the first time, this is probably, the most useful slide, that I can offer that introduces, what we do. So I always say upfront when presenting the slides that the vision for AGCAM is to give businesses a real time overview of all their cash inflows and outflows, structured in the way that their business is set up. So to reflect how they operate as a business that can be used both for planning purposes and also to drive actions from a cash perspective. So at the core of that is obviously ERP data on the one hand. So importing the AP and AR ledgers from an ERP system into AGiCap, for visibility, and then, the banking data to track the actuals, that come in. So knowing, how you predicted your performance as a business and measuring that against how you actually performed as well as being able to initiate actions with those banks as well. So this slide splits really into a top half and a bottom half, if you can see carefully. And the top half is what I would consider to be the kind of the core of the AGICAP platform, which is the cash management and the cash flow planning side. And then the bottom half is, the modular aspects of AGICAP with accounts payable automation and accounts receivable automation. And we'll cover what both of those look like, in the demo as well. Now how does all that functionality sort of fit into the ERP setup? Yeah. I think it's a great question. I think I would look at it in kind of 2 ways. The first way to think about it is, where AGCap fits into a broader financial ecosystem, and it kind of depends on the stage of maturity that your business is at. So building out your business, and I I remember this first time because I used to work in a business that was just 10 people. And one of the big challenges at the beginning was building out processes, that could make our lives easier and stop us sending, thousands of emails to manage invoices, doing stuff in, a paper based way. And what your ERP system can do is connect the dots. So as your business grows, it can give you excellent, it can turn those, those actions, those operational activities into data points, and it can provide a lot of automation that saves you from spending time doing those activities. And ultimately, as you get bigger and bigger, which is where I think ERP starts to get really, really exciting, it can give you a very holistic view of what can be quite a complicated business. You know, you can imagine, multi entity scenario, in a classic NetSuite ERP situation where they operate a business is operating in multiple currencies. It's got, several different divisions, and your ERP can enable you to have a data view of all those different activities that you do, and plan going forward. And I think that is kind of that's the power of an ERP system. What AGICAP is enabling businesses to do is bring that data to life from a planning perspective, and from an optimization perspective in terms of cash. So if we want to grow by x amount in a given time frame, what do we need to do to do that? Okay. We need to hire a few more people, and we need our sales performance to grow this much. AGCAD forecasting can enable you to see, your sales forecast on a month by month basis from a cash perspective that can then align that to the investments that you need to make in your business. So from a planning perspective, it can be, incredibly valuable to enable those goals. And also in the flip scenario, if you're a cash constrained business, you can or any business, because all businesses have risk, you can see the risk scenarios as well. And then similarly, with the live banking connections, AGIcap can also enable you to then track the performance of your forecast. So you can see on an ongoing basis how you're performing against your goals. That's really the value that I see for AGI Cap. Stage 1 of your of growing your business is, you know, putting good processes in place, managing the data quality. And then AGI Cap is that next stage where you say, okay. Now I wanna grow my business. Now I wanna optimise the performance of my business. And the live visibility that AGCap gives you via direct connections enables you to do that at speed and at scale. Presumably, you spoke about, the 10 person business day that you started out. I mean, I imagine those those processes, that cash, forecasting process is actually more just as important for a 10 person business as it is for a for a 100 man user bit, you know, count business, with multi subsidiaries across the world. Those things are just as important. Yeah. It's really interesting, actually, the different use cases of AduCap. In a 10 person business, AduCap can be very valuable because the teams are very lean, like you say. You know, typically, you don't have a finance team. You have one person who's responsible for finance and ops. And actually, they're just wearing many, many different hats, or it could be the CEO might also be doing the financial reporting. If they've got, external investment, that's quite a common scenario. And what AdjuCat gives them is the, automation. That's the real value of the tool. So they don't have to spend so much time, on bringing together the information. Whereas in a bigger business where you've got multi entity scenarios or multicurrency scenarios or many different bank accounts, it's operational, of course. You can imagine scenarios of logging into lots of different banks. It's very painful exercise, downloading the data and then collating it, but also it's much more strategic because the power of bringing that information together is being able to use it, being able to analyze it, being able to, plan with it, being able to align it to the sales forecast, being able to convert the sales forecast into actual expected payment dates rather than just, oh, we're hoping to grow by 20% this year. When are we gonna receive that cash, and what can we do with that? So, the use case magic happens is is very different for those two businesses. And I would say one is more around automation, one is more strategic, I would say. Cool. And I think this slide as well for, people, it's the last slide, and then I'll I'll show you what it looks like. It's very helpful for understanding how AGICAP fits, with ERP systems. So if we think back to the previous slide that we looked at, for this one, you'll recognize cash management and cash flow planning, and that's what we see at the top of this slide as well, and we have the same at the bottom. And your ERP data is what's feeding into this hub, your outstanding invoices, your payment orders, your credit notes, all of that information is feeding into AGICAP, alongside the banking data that's enabling you to plan, and AGCAP can also accommodate, data sources from elsewhere. So it could be a CRM system, a separate CRM system like we ourselves have, or, P and L forecast. So if a business is trying to grow, maybe they've got a 3 year business plan, and also, other sources maybe from an FP and A tool. And it's combining all of that data into one view that is a huge part of the value prop of AGNCAT because so often a business will have its cash flow forecast, but that information is completely separate from the sales forecast. And the sales team and the finance team are not talking to each other, and that is a challenge. Right. Can I just I mean, obviously, we're talking you're a NetSuite partner? We're also a NetSuite partner, but this tool isn't just for NetSuite. It is ERP agnostic. Right? Ashcap is ERP agnostic. Yeah. Ashcap is working with in the UK, NetSuite, Business Central, Microsoft Great Plains, Sage Sage Intact, all of the, I think, Epicor, I've also seen it. I mean, I've seen the full range of the RPs. Yeah. And I think a point I wanna make is I think we might have some some people on here that aren't on NetSuite, but they're on the, the legacy RP systems that we also support. I think this this is, equally can be used with those systems. And we've seen how you integrate with those systems, and it's, it it works alongside how we would integrate as well. Yeah. Absolutely. Cool. So let's get into what it looks like. So I think if I stop sharing, I then have to reshare, and this should enable me. Can you see my new screen? Yep. Yes. Okay. Great. So this is the AGCap main dashboards. What you see in front of you is, surprise, surprise, a cash flow forecast. It is running at the moment on a monthly basis. So from May of this year through to, March or October of next year, but that can be flexed very, very easily depending on the business needs. So we have customers who are looking at their cash daily, we've customers looking at their cash weekly, and of course monthly. I would say it's most common, and the forecast can be adjusted to suit those needs. So, for the moment, I'll keep it as monthly, because I think it's the easiest to work with. In terms of the colors, green's cash in, red's cash out, blue is cash balance, and I'll just explain the difference in shades here as well. So what we have on the left hand side of these darker shades, and that's because it's data feeding directly from the banks. So if I hover here, you'll say you'll say you'll see it says actuals, and if I click it takes me to this bank tab that we have here, where I can suddenly see all of my transactions on a bank by bank basis, categorized in the way that I want them to be categorized. So it's very important for me to say that actually it's very flexible when it comes to categorization. It can incorporate your existing category structure. We can work with you to build a category structure, in order to categorize your transactions that come in, and then also the projects they're associated with when, those transactions were paid and how much for, and, of course, I can sort as I would in any other spreadsheet. Then if I, hover just on the right hand side where we've got these diagonal lines and then also this kind of lighter shade of green. If I hover, you can see it says expected and it says gap to forecast. And the expected is what's already in your ERP. So this is telling me that I've got £1,200,000 worth of sales orders already in my ERP system, And I've got a gap to forecast of 13,900,000 or 14,000,000. So in total, I had I had forecast 15,200,000 for the month of October. And at the moment, in my ERP, I've only got about 1,200,000 of that. So my sales team, they really better crack on, otherwise, things could get, messy, quite quickly. If they do crack on, then what you would see happen is that these diagonal lines would slowly disappear, and a super super accurate forecast would be one where this green box at the bottom slowly over the course of the month eliminates those diagonal lines. So final thing to say on that would be, the where the forecast data comes from. So if we just hover again, the expected, as a reminder that's coming from the from the ERP, and then the gap to forecast is your what you had forecast minus your expected, and your forecast can come from a range of external sources. If we think back to that slide I showed a moment ago showing the different data feeds that AGIcap can accommodate. So it could be an FPNA output. It could be, a budget forecast you've done. It could be a 3 year plan. In AGCap's own use case, we use our ERP for the short term forecast, and then for the long term forecast, we use a dashboarding tool, from which we take a download, and we adjust, to accommodate, ambitious salespeople's targets, and then we feed that into AGCAMP for the long term forecast. And for that, we go out several years. Some customers only go out 1 year, some go out 3 years. Both can be handled. Then once you've got the data feeding into your forecast, the key thing to do is set up the rows below, and this is where I think AGI Cap, is really, at its most powerful in the level of granularity that enables customers to go to. So here, you can kinda see that I've got mine set up by geographical entity, but if I were a hospitality business, it could be set up by site 1, site 2, site 3, or if I'm a retail business, it could be online sales channel 1, online sales channel 2, bricks and mortar 1, bricks and mortar 2. However your business is set up, AGCAPS, can be designed or customized to reflect that operational setup so that your data feeds into your forecast in the way that you wanna actually analyze the performance of your business and plan for the growth of your business. Obviously, you can then do the same on the outflow side as well. So that's kind of the main forecast. The final thing I'll mention on the forecasting piece is the multi entity, multi currency side of AGICAP. So here you'll see says consolidated view. But if I want to assess my business performance through, a currency lens or an individual business, lens. So this is very common for businesses operating internationally or businesses that have grown through acquisition. Then I can simply hone in on a specific entity. Here, I've got it done by bank account, but I could easily do it by entity or by currency. And then I go back to the consolidated view, and that enables me to see my entire, cash performance. And here, I've got my kind of main scenario running, but then I can add in different scenarios very easily, directly building them within the tool and seeing them side by side as I go. Now how does the your forecasting tool differ from other forecasting tools that are on the market? Mhmm. So I think the key differentiator for ATCAP, between existing forecasting solutions and those, and ourselves is one level of complexity that AGIcap can handle. So many forecasting solutions can only forecast in that base currency. AGCap can forecast in multiple different currencies. Then the other aspect of AGCap's solution is the ability to connect to your ERP, additional long term sources, and then also the banking data. And that banking data starts to become extremely valuable for businesses when you start to think about, measuring the performance of your forecast and tracking how you plan to grow this year against how you've actually performed. So here we have this dedicated module for that, which is called actuals versus forecast. This is an exercise that all businesses are doing on a monthly basis. You know, they say, oh, we forecast this much cash for the month. How did that do? At the end of the month, does it match the banks? With the direct bank connections in Anchocap, you can see that on a month by month basis as part of this module, or you can log directly into our cash positioning module where AGCap will show you the, bank by, the transaction by transaction breakdown of your different bank accounts broken down as you want by currency or cash pool as you want. So here at the top, you can see the total cash balance across all my business in all my different bank accounts, But then I could go in and hone in on a specific bank account, if I wanted to. And then I can see, if I just click, specific transactions that are coming up relating to that bank account. And then I can also see that as a calendar as well. If this will load, which it does. Here I can see, the amount, the specific transactions going out today, what category they relate to, what bank account they relate to, and then this data that can be then be fed back into my ERP. So in terms of AGCap's forecasting solution, I think there are plenty of good forecasting solutions on there out on the market. What Adityaap is really doing is collating the, so many different sources of information that's enabling businesses to avoid a scenario where they're forecasting cash in one tool, forecasting, the p and l in a spreadsheet, and then looking at their sales forecast and their purchasing strategy in different tools. And then also enabling a level of granularity that is very, very difficult to achieve in, a spreadsheet forecast or other forecasting tools, both on a currency and entity perspective. And then also having the bank integrations enabling businesses to track the performance of their forecast and see how that's gonna affect them in the upcoming future, or going forward, which will as it relates to their business planning, which ultimately is what's gonna drive their business forward or cost their business, quite severely. Don't you you've kinda answered the question when I was gonna answer. When I saw you had the bank connections in there, I was gonna ask you actually, how does that differ from the standard NetSuite connector that Salt Edge provide? Obviously, there's a lot more detail in there, but is there anything else that that that kind of that comes with that? Yeah. So AGGI cap, can I mean, the main difference that you can connect via multiple different methods? So SaltEdge is just one of, many different banking connection methods that Edgecam has. Others being Edgecam can connect by SWIFT, PST 2, SFTP, a range of different methods, which enable, more secure banking connections and also increased speed of visibility and then ultimately different relationships with the bank. Yeah. I guess there's definitely more functionality in what you can do with the data Yeah. That's coming through. So on the between the bank accounts, for example, you could do stuff like this. You can start to set up automatic balancing transactions and start to send instructions to the bank. You can start to manage, groups. I think this is something that's super, super valuable for financial controllers out there, looking at multiple bank accounts across, different entities. They can set up, individual, cash pools. So for for example, the law firm that we've been speaking to where they want to look at their cash on an office by office basis, split across different, currencies. And they can do that by building a cash pool. And then they want to set up balancing transfers to move cash between offices, bank accounts of the same currency when one drops below a certain level. So my New York office has got loads of US dollars, hopefully, but my Brussels office is running out. When it drops below this level, send money, from the New York office to the Brussels office in USD. That kind of activity is what centralizing this information is about, and then also calculating your risk of incurring bank fees. So for example, because you have the transaction by transaction level detail, and you've got that in an upcoming schedule, AGI Cal will start to flash red when you're at risk and you can avoid this by moving payment data out. So in answer to the question, how does it differ? Range of connection methods. So that's very valuable for being able to connect with, unusual banks, improving the consistency of connection. Yeah. I was gonna say unusual banks is probably one that we've come up against quite regularly that aren't on on the salt edge list and therefore just unable to connect to. Yeah. It I mean, that's kind of how AdigiCap as well started connecting with more and more banks, or using different methods, because we came up with against the challenge of certain banks just couldn't be connected via 3rd party APIs. So, in order to continue to provide the exciting stuff, which is being able to move the money between accounts, adjust payment dates, then we need to find other ways to connect. So, any more questions? None for now. In order so kind of yeah. Thinking back to that initial slide I showed about the platform itself, we've kind of been through the top right, which is the cash flow planning sides, and then the top left, which is the cash positioning sides. The in terms of outputs that customers might want, I think it's worth touching quickly on the range of dashboards that you're able to build within Adjikat. So for every customer, they would set up individual dashboards. That sounded like a question. Yeah. I was just I was gonna just ask. I know you may have covered it. Just just what how do you kind of see what your long term forecast against your short term? How does that kind of work? Sure. So, if I just go back to the main forecast. So you can see this runs all the way out to October next year. Unless, I'm a business with remarkably consistent, sales persons or in fact, I'm not gonna have any data in my ERP running for July 2025. So but I wanna have some kind of idea about how much cash I'm gonna have in, July 2025. So what I want to do in that scenario where my ERP data runs out, which might be in a month, might be in 2 months, might be in 3 months, I would, start to bring in another source of data, and that could be, anything from a f and a output. It could be, a budget forecast 3 year plan, and I could do that by using HADIcap's P&L conversion module, where typically customers will convert their P and L into specific cash categories. So an example would be, staff cost is just one line item on a p and l, and you make some projections around, increasing staff costs over a given time frame. And then you wanna convert that into cash categories. So I would say, oh, let's look at full time employees and freelancers. And then here, I've done a previous example with suppliers. I've got UK suppliers and international suppliers. And then that can start to feed in to my main forecast. So you see that does so here in the forecast. And there I can add in data points directly into the forecast either manually or just by importing the p and l directly. And here I can start to do cool stuff like based on historical performance or based on indicators, directly within the tool as well. Could you bring in, customer quotas that you've set up in NetSuite if you've if you've done that pre predone that for, you know, for the year or 2 year plan? Yeah. 100%. Yeah. Yeah. I think, it's very, very flexible in terms of the the data you can incorporate from a long term perspective. And from a short term perspective, you get the direct ERP feed. Yes. Right. Yeah. Cool. So where were the dashboards? So, yeah, in terms of outputs, so, you know, kind of key reporting requirements, cash flow forecasting isn't just a fun exercise, that everyone does at Syncre. It's usually, for monthly meetings, and typically customers as part of their onboarding will set up, a the key KPIs that they wanna focus on. So here, it's a lot around net cash balance. But similarly, if I were a debt finance business, I could set up, dashboards that focus specifically on that. So here you can see, breakdown of the repayments by bank, interest pay repayments. Again, I think flexibility is kind of the keyword. And then if I wanted to export them, for the monthly meeting just beforehand, having initiated a sync here to ensure the data is up to date, I could do that, or some customers just log into the tool to look at, the dashboards as well. For those debt finance businesses, we also offer our debt management module, which also similar to the bank connectivity side. It's kind of like a centralized hub of debts, so you can manage the repayments more easily in here and also see them feed into your cash flow plan. So those are kind of the 2 core modules that we've covered. The other exciting feature, that we have within AGICAP is the initiation of the goods receipting process. So typically, this is where, from NetSuite or another ERP, we will take supplier invoices and supplier, payment details, and then we'll start to, run the goods receipting process. So here I've got, an invoice to verify, and here, Azure Capital OCR, extract the key details from the uploaded PDF, and then I, as the finance user, can request verification of that information. You, James, if, this invoice rate is something you had bought, would, then confirm that the goods or service had been delivered to a satisfaction. And then with that verification that you do, this would update and move into verified column here within AngiCap with and be marked as to pay, and then I as the finance user can start to move to invoices that I want to pay. And here I start to prepare them, so I can do that on a manual basis, go through them individually, select the supplier that I need to pay, when I wanna pay it, is it domestic or an internal transfer, or I can do it in batch if I want. I've just got a day when I wanna wanna make all my payments. I can select the the payment date like that. And then here, you can see it recognizes the bank account is missing, so I can't actually pay that supplier. So you avoid that scenario of sending out payment runs and then finding that there's errors. And then your CFO will come in to sign it sign it off, or whoever the admin user is. And then here, you have that record of transactions that have been sent to the bank, and then that data can be reshared into the ERP like that. And that is AGCap's AP Automation. Can you set up rules in that that, certain categories would automatically be paid rather than needing authorization? Good question, actually. This is the dashboards you would have. Can you set up rules within that? You can definitely set up a lot of rules within Anchocap. I think you can set up rules within that. Okay. Here, payment validation rules. So here, we're look mainly looking at, who has to validate invoice before payment, but, I don't know if it gets done on a category basis. I can look into that. It's a good call out. And then we offer the same kind of automation on the AR side. So goal of this module is really to kind of to identify those customers that Paylay and come up with actions to, ensure that either they pay on time or if they're not gonna pay, at our preferred time, then we can try and switch them to direct debit. So at least we know with security when they're gonna pay. So here, you've got the kind of a list of, clients and and and relevant invoices. You can see in my demo account, thankfully, things are pretty bad. So I don't know. Maybe it's just a terrible business I'm running. But I could filter them by tags. Probably, there'd be a lot of disputes, but clearly, things are not going well. And then, similarly, I've got kind of customizable analytics that can help me focus on the DSO, who are the worst offenders, who do I really need to hone in on, who do I need to ditch as a customer, that sort of thing. And then I can come up with follow-up plans, a bit like a sales sequence where, you know, you've got email 1, 5 days before payment, email 2, and 3 days before payment, and then call on day of payment. You can create those plans. So that this is this would replace a dunning process if the if a customer had had a dunning process in place? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And then we've got chat gpt built in to kind of help, create templates that can be used. Cool. So that's kind of, a whistle stop tour of the platform. I see I've managed already to go over time. Did any questions get posted in the chat, or, is there anything else that we need to cover? Doesn't look like it. So I think, we can finish up there. If there are any questions, then, people can book a demo with me directly for the link here if they wanna see how it would work for their own business. Very happy to share more, answer questions, on Adjicap, But otherwise, see you at the next webinar. Thanks very much, James, and speak soon. Thank you very much. Thanks, Nat. Alright.