From financial planning and budgeting to auditing and accounting, Finance manages the business’s money and is responsible for issuing accurate and timely financial statements.
Here are four ways smart Finance teams leverage their company’s’ e-commerce platform to maximize security and efficiency while minimizing errors and ensuring first-rate customer experience.
ERP Integration
One of the chief roles of the Finance department is the optimization of the order-to-cash process: how quickly (and efficiently) money from orders converts to revenues.
For this reason, Finance teams prefer an ERP-integrated e-commerce solution. Without ERP integration, the company has to copy every new order and invoice to both systems.
This back-and-forth copying is time-consuming. And if the company gets a large volume of orders, their success can actually become a bottleneck that stalls order fulfillment.
PCI Security
Credit card security is a top priority for companies that do business online. PCI Certification is the only way to guarantee the security of credit card data.
But obtaining PCI Certification is a long and expensive process—one that needs to be repeated every single year to keep your Certification.
Choosing an e-commerce provider that undertakes annual PCI Certification of their own platform allows you to benefit from the security of a PCI Certified solution without the time and cost of getting certified.
Controlled user access
Clearly defining the levels of access for each user group on your site is critical both to business security and to the overall strategy.
B2B companies often have detailed purchase rules governing the sale of their products. Clients may have to order a minimum quantity of a certain product, for instance, or may be limited to a maximum quantity per order for another.
With a well-configured e-commerce solution, a company can define the levels of approval for each purchase rule and escalate each case as needed on the web store’s back end.
Self-service features
Businesses without ERP integration lose an enormous amount of money on post-sale service calls, almost always for simple issues like order status updates. Finance departments want an e-commerce solution that lets customers manage these tasks for themselves.
Not only does this save your team a considerable amount of time and money, it dramatically improves the customer experience. This autonomy ultimately translates into long-term customer loyalty, in addition to significant cost savings for your business.
Want to learn more? k-eCommerce will be at the Financial Process Automation Conference (FPAC) hosted at Microsoft Canada HQ on March 5. Register today!
