Receivables
A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all!
Introduction
Our main role in the Receivables Solution is to ensure that all (sales) customer transactions of a company are properly documented and registered and that via providing full transparency on customer balances and taking respective actions the money is coming into the business on time. With the E2E solution for Receivables, we focus on increasing the speed and timeliness with the ultimate target to come as close as possible to the real-time recognition of all customer transactions.
Our experts are focused on processing financial transactions related to sales and customers most accurately and effectively, by continuous analysis and improvement of provided services, to drive efficiency and standardization of accounting processes according to best practices and modern solutions. Within Receivables, we appreciate the diversity of the country's business portfolio and highly demanding customer relations. We offer to the MCC countries complex, standardized, yet flexible service which allows the local teams to focus on front-end customer management, while all customer records are kept within a stable and standardized accounting framework.
Services
Customer Accounting
Our Customer Accounting service includes:
- allocation of customer payments
- daily management of customer records, incl. customer account clearing and balance confirmation
- customer dunning
Read more about Customer Accounting Service
We focus on regular and complex routines around customer accounts, continuously identifying and populating best practices and improvement initiatives.
Our primary goal is to ensure speedy and proper allocation of customer payments. With successful utilization of the potential of Autobank (corporate tool dedicated to supporting bank statement processing) we drive an increase of automatic allocations and clearing rates for those incoming payments. Reaching a very high automation level in the process resulting in significant limitation of the workload opens the gate towards smart reinvestment of those efficiency gains an increase of frequency of bank statement postings. With the solution of intra-day bank statements, the customer payments may be recognized even faster what allows more frequent credit limit refreshment for the customers.
Any payments which stay open on customer accounts are recognizable thanks to the implementation of unified reason codes.
Daily management of customer records is our priority – it includes as well striving for increased effectiveness of automated clearings as analysis of open items, processing of customer refunds, and maintenance of rejected direct debits.
Our target are clear and transparent balances on customer accounts, consisting of understandable and trackable records.
Having the accounts in the best shape, we have a solid basis to perform subsequent activities of dunning and balance confirmation with the customers. In these areas we see great space for improvements, going for a more structured and automized approach (e-solutions) which are already in place for some countries.
Completion of this area comprises in preparation and delivery of standard reports, as used by the countries. It has as well great potential to develop in the future into a standardized information package, consisting of crucial information for receivables management.
Daily Sales
Our Daily Sales service includes:
- assurance of daily sales data transfer and posting to accounting systems
- reconciliation of payments with financial data for Cash&Carry and Delivery
- managing and monitoring open items on payment mean accounts
- identification and clarification of differences
- issuing consolidated invoices
Read more about Daily Sales Service
Accounting of daily sales from MCC stores is the closest accounting activity to Metro’s core business which is ‘Sales’.
In our GBS-Center, we ensure that all sales data is transferred correctly between source and accounting systems and afterward properly distributed and posted to correct accounts.
We gather all transactional evidence from the cashier systems and reconcile it with financial data representing all payment means (like cash, cards, cheques, vouchers, etc.). Our goal is to identify and clarify all differences as well as to maintain a transparent track of all open items on sales accounts.
With our automated reconciliation tools, we ensure top-quality data exchange between store operations and accounting teams, reduction of extensive manual workload, and elimination of paper documentation.
Thanks to the presence of native speakers in our accounting teams, communication with local stores is not an issue.
Status of sales activities is being reported via number of standard reports – they contain process performance indicators as well as reversed KPI’s like response times from the stores and number of open inquiries for information (to dissolve differences on accounts).
Within the area of daily sales, we are also supporting our partners within the solutions connected with the handling of consolidated invoices for end-customers as well as the handling of VAT returns.
3rd Party Invoicing
Our 3rd party invoicing service includes:
- issuing and posting of non-commercial invoices
Read more about 3rd Party Invoicing
We provide a centralized service of issuing and posting non-commercial invoices between MCC-entities and external parties.
Recording of any kind of additional sales transactions beyond Metro core-business (commercial sales) and group sales transactions (intercompany) belongs to this service package. No matter if electricity-recharge, waste-disposal or fixed-asset sales – we take care of them.
We offer a “request based” service for any ad-hoc and one-time invoices and a “rule-based” approach for regular and repetitive invoicing, following pre-approved posting logic and standardized invoice templates.
Issued invoices are delivered to their recipients in the agreed way - electronically or by paper. We may store them in the destination folder or send them directly to the invoice receiver.
AR Subledger Closing
- standard month end closing tasks
- reclassification, regrouping and revaluation of receivables
- calculation and posting of accruals and provisions
- reconciliation of sub-ledger accounts vs. general ledger accounts
- monitoring and write off of uncollectable receivables
Read more about AR Subledger Closing Service
Our accounting teams take full responsibility for the smooth and on-time closing of the accounting period within the accounts receivable area.
The closing activities contain calculations and postings of reclassification, regrouping, and revaluation of receivables.
We perform reconciliation of sub-ledger accounts vs. general ledger accounts to ensure that balances for accounting period transactions are matching.
We also monitor uncollectable receivables and write them off in case they are no longer possible to be accrued via specific or general allowance.
Live-tracking of all closing activities in our tool called SSC Board allows us, but also the local team, to follow up very closely on completeness and timeliness of the closing and to take immediate corrective actions if required.
Being the predecessor of General Ledger-closing, we give our best performance to contribute positively to the highest financial reporting scorecard result of the country.
Team
The Accounts Receivable (AR) division is the biggest operational team in terms of the headcount and certainly the most diverse one, with 150+ team members coming from very multi-cultural and multi-language environments across the entire world. Our three AR sections are managing 12 operational teams, which currently provide services to 16 MCC countries and 6 entities (MAG, trading offices, METRO Digital, METRO Properties PL). Our scope is constantly growing to cover with standard service all MCC countries.
We understand the importance of building long-term relationships – that is why we can also speak Polish, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, French, German, Russian, Italian, Hungarian, and few more languages- to provide the best possible service to local markets.
Our commitment is to actively contribute to the sustainable development of our customers by taking over a multitude of transactional and non-transactional accounting activities from head offices and stores and therefore allowing them to focus on their core business.
We focus on building end-to-end process understanding among our accountants and keeping process dependencies under the umbrella of one team, dedicated to the specific country portfolio. We invest in learning and growing the competencies of our team members to be able to blend automated solutions with analytical skills and necessary attention to handling exceptions and non-standard instances.
BENEFITS OF WORKING WITH US
We are a Finance Solution Center with more than 300 Finance & Accounting enthusiasts committed to providing you the best accounting service experience. As we have accounting in our DNA, here are some numbers that speak better than words about our services:
