Improved reconciliation for a better customer experience

The challenge

Vodafone India’s business is spread across 23 different circles across India and involves complex physical and electronic collections. However, Vodafone has a technology-driven culture to devise solutions for its customers. As a result, the treasury team wanted to automate all electronic collections, which would result in automating cash allocation and application directly into the billing system, thereby reconciling receipts with the outstanding orders which will eventually lead to the faster release of services to its customers.

Given that Vodafone was receiving intra-day statements for reconciling receipts; it was important to identify the remitter, match it to the existing distributors and finally post the receipts into its billing system which would then result in quicker invoicing and ultimately successful delivery of goods and services to the distributor.

The solution

One of the critical objectives of the AR reconciliation solution was to ensure faster application of cash received to its logical purpose, thereby ensuring faster sales invoicing and seamless delivery of goods and services. From a treasury perspective, the team went through a rigorous in-house process of selecting banks/partners who could help them do this without changing too many processes internally.

To do this, Vodafone, working with Standard Chartered, implemented a virtual account-based auto-receipt generation process via near real-time reports received using an SFTP channel into the billing system. This has enabled Vodafone to significantly streamline its order to cash process, reduce manual efforts/handoffs in the application of receipts. The treasury and collections team now have complete visibility of collections, mapping directly into Vodafone’s billing system.

While treasury was facilitating the change process, it was the collections, IT and controls teams who worked diligently to ensure a robust process change in the reconciliation of receipts from distributors. This activity of application of receipt which could have taken anywhere between four to six hours is now completed in less than 30 minutes.

Best practice and innovation

Vodafone has harnessed its technology-centric culture and is in the process of driving higher sales by delivering goods and services near real-time from the time of receipt of cash. With the setting up of an automated generation of all receipts directly into Vodafone’s billing system, the collections team have a much higher visibility of cash, leading to faster invoicing and release of goods ordered.

The company will not only be able to generate receipts near real-time but has also built a monitoring mechanism for the delivery of files, which adds additional controls. The entire system is robust, scalable and will act as a building block for future developments.