A 33% increase in unpaid invoices collection using Charisma Collection

Company

REGINA MARIA, the largest private healthcare network in Romania, gained the leadership position on the Romanian medical market due to the quality of the   services and the outstanding number of medical units targeting over 230 000 subscribers and hundreds of thousands of patients in the retail sector. In figures, in March 2014, REGINA MARIA, The private healthcare network, held: 21 own clinics, 4 hospitals, 2 maternity hospitals, 3 medical campuses, 5 imaging centers, a stem cells bank and over 140 partner clinics throughout the country. The activity is sustained by a national network of clinical laboratories (Bucharest, Braşov, Constanţa, Bacău, Cluj and Craiova) ensuring emergency medical tests required by hospitals, as well as non-emergency medical tests required by other units. The laboratory network ensures a wide range of investigations, both common and advanced diagnostic tests, exceeding thus, 1 500 types of medical tests.

Challenge

For the financial-accounting activity, REGINA MARIA was using Charisma ERP system, with features dedicated to monitor the customers’ financial situation. The tardy customers were tracked by a Credit Controller, and the collection activity was performed by area managers, based on reports manually processed in excel.

“Given that the amount of data was large and unmanageable, a software solution was needed to support us and offer centralized data, real time customer’s financial situation, customer history, statistics regarding the payment behavior etc.” relates the Credit controller at REGINA MARIA, The private healthcare network.

Solution

REGINA MARIA was already using one of TotalSoft’s software platforms, with integrated components enabling to manage the entire activity uniformly. A new software solution from TotalSoft’s portfolio could be rapidly integrated, with all the software solution’s specific benefits.

Charisma Collection implementation was based on the specifications prepared by the REGINA MARIA team and lasted around 2 months. Charisma Collection is developed on Microsoft CRM technology, as an add-on to Charisma ERP, in order to exclusively manage the debts collection process, while providing the entire client’s financial data for all the users (contact data, data regarding contracts, financial situation). The software solution natively integrates with the CRM system, the sales and marketing modules to manage all the customers’ actions uniformly. Charisma Collection was rapidly assimilated and the users were trained.

 
Results

• The collection activities were automated through the activities generated by the application, such as: phone calls, SMS, mails, notifications, at a specific time interval, according to the timelines by REGINA MARIA and depending on customer type and behavior”.The overdue invoice collection has increased by 33% compared to the period before the software implementation, mostly due to process automation and the payment reminder notices sent at specific time intervals”.
• One of the highest impact actions generated by Charisma Collection is the automate initiation of the invoice collection process, starting from the day after the due date, compared to the previous process that did not allow such a debt tracking. “Before implementing the application, we were working with reports updated at various time intervals. Now, our clients, along with us, receive reminder notices starting with the first day after the due date,” .
• The financial situations are updated on a daily basis. Accordingly, the data are correct and complete at any moment. This is a very important aspect of the collection process given that the financial data accuracy has a major impact on the efforts undertaken by the process managers.
• The automatic activity generation and centralized tracking in CRM “enable us to easily generate reports, verify the action status of each manager, using customer categories, various time periods etc. we completely removed the data centralization because the system generates any type of report we want” says the Credit Controller at REGINA MARIA.
• The time spent for the databases filtering used for customers reminder notices via Microsoft Outlook is saved “Charisma Collection sends automatic SMSs and alerts at specific time intervals, depending on the customer’s category. Thus, we succeeded to optimize the activity of each collection specialist and avoid the less pleasant conversations with our clients” adds the Credit Controller with Regina Maria.
• The integration with the sales module allows the collection specialists to track the situation of every account much more easily, including the related history. Furthermore, any interested user can access client’s financial history and payment behavior as well, including the promised and executed payments.

[Case study written in 2014]