Profile Management is essential to maintain correct and up-to-date master data on your customers and vendors. Without it your company will experience more errors, disputes, unauthorized deductions and chargebacks.

Profile Management is an ongoing process. It can be very time consuming if you don’t automate the process, and provide a self-service portal for your customers and vendors to self-manage their accounts. But, even when you provide a self-service portal it can still be a challenge to get customers and vendors to update their data.

Magic Links are the answer. They can be used in a number of ways to facilitate Profile Management.

Self-Onboarding

You can send an email to a customer to update and verify accounts payable information, or to a vendor to do the same for accounts receivable data. Simply include a Magic Link to an online form where they can update and verify their account information as needed.

Data and Documentation

It’s easy to use Magic Links to collect data and documentation online. After clicking on the Magic Link, accounting can update the profile, and add missing documentation. Once updated that information can be synced back to your ERP.

This is the point at which you want to make sure you captured the all-important TIN information correctly to avoid fines from the IRS.

You could collect information manually by combing invoices, contracts, files, websites, and LinkedIn pages, but think of how much time you can save if your customers and vendors self-manage their information.

Record Verification

It’s important to have a log of updates to customer and vendor data. It helps establish trust in the data and support audit activities.

Self-Correcting Process

The biggest mistake in Profile Management is not getting the correct email address to begin with. As much as 10-12% of invoices are sent to an email address that is not the accounts payable department. The problem is usually not discovered until after the first invoice becomes past due. You might get lucky and have a recipient forward the invoice to the AP department, but that doesn’t usually happen.

You can provide a self-correcting process for this situation by adding a message like:

If this email is being sent to the wrong person please click here to let us know who we should be sending these to.

Your initial contact inside the customer can get you to the right contact and address because they are the most likely to know who the email should go to.

Follow-Up

You can automate follow-up to send a reminder regarding your request. Don’t get stuck at the end of the queue, use automation to get a response sooner.

Share Your Profile

You can use automation to share your profile information with your contacts. Make it easy for customers and vendors to reach you when they need to.

Magic Links are the answer to customer and vendor data issues. With automated credit and collection solutions it is possible to optimize automation, and increase cash flow.

Lockstep Collect, a leader in cloud-based credit and collection platforms, can help you collect cash in 4 ways:

  • Cloud-based solutions
  • Automated customer communications
  • Customer self-service
  • Collections Activity Management

Lockstep Collect is an experienced software partner that can help you maximize your collections and cash flow in the new normal.

If you would like to learn more about how you can benefit from automated credit and collection solutions, please contact Lockstep Collect at www.lockstep.io.