I am sure that everyone is battling a bit with cash flow in these tight economic times. Our company has been looking at ways to move our customers to a more automated payment process. The questions began when we started spending so much time trying to collect for $26/month hosting contracts…. A real pain and also quite unprofitable. So how can we use our Netsuite accounting software and CRM functions to mine our customer data and make sure we have a crystal clear understanding of how each of our 400ish customers is set up to pay? First, Jay our Netsuite optimization Czar and Andrew from our customer services team hooked up to document how each customer is set up to pay. This may seem simple, but we did not have customer records tagged to show how customers were paying. The results were amazing. We saw that over 300 customers were set up to pay by check. This is great if you can count on the checks every month on the same day, but with ACH our customers can still pay direct with their checking accounts, but we don’t have to go down the collections or “turn off service” route. We now know that we have 160K in Accounts Receivable tagged to customers that “pay by check” – the march is on to move them to direct ACH or Credit Card payments! Netsuite as an accounting and CRM software platform is allowing us to have unprecedented access to our customer payment trends to allow us to manage our cash flow expectations and lower the amount of time we spend on dreaded collections.