The Ridiculously Simple Way to Improve Emailed Invoice Delivery from Oracle

Note: This guide can be applied to more than Oracle EBS. This technique will also work with SAP, JD Edwards, and even homegrown, UNIX-based systems.

“Did you get my email?”

We’ve covered this topic in the past, in a particularly fun post titled “Oracle Email Delivery — Why Schrödinger’s Cat Matters.”
Business Users of Oracle (and other ERPs) often lack insight into the status of their emailed invoices. They get sent via batch delivery, or even individually, but you have no idea if the recipient opened the invoice. At a more fundamental level, you don’t know if the email was even delivered.

So what do you do?

• Pick up the phone and call to find out?
• Fire off another email from your mailbox to inquire?

These both sound like great options, but more than likely, you probably just hang tight hoping the payment comes in. Until it doesn’t. Then you’re forced to follow up with the customer when the payment is already late.

What is the Order-To-Cash process? And how can it be improved?

The Order-to-Cash process is a series of steps that looks something like this:

1. Accept Customer Order
2. Fulfill Sales Order
3. Deliver Product / Service
4. Create & Send Invoice
5. Collect Payment
6. Reconcile Invoice

Look back at that list. ☝️

How many of those steps in the process do you have control over? How many do you rely on the customer for?

That’s right. There’s only one step in the cycle that you can’t control. Step 5: Collect Payment.

Not surprisingly, this one step is usually the step that takes the longest. So how can we speed up time-to-payment?

1 Simple Way to Improve the Order-To-Cash Process

B2B Email Delivery Tracking

Throughout the year, your AR team will spend countless hours on the phone or sending simple emails JUST to find out if the intended recipient even got the email with the invoice.

Oracle EBS’s native functionality is excellent for getting simple documents out quickly. However, it lacks the in-depth insights your team needs to manage those outbound documents—like critical invoices—effectively.

By delivering Oracle email through a third-party email delivery service (such as MailGun or SparkPost) you can easily track the status of your emailed documents and files. The service will then allow you to see when an email was received, if (and when) it was opened, or if the file bounced for some reason.

With these insights, your accounting team will be able to conduct more focused follow-up and even hold customers accountable to defined payment terms.

AventX can share detailed status information—such as open, click, accept/reject,
& bounce data—directly inside Oracle for your emailed invoices, POs, & and more.

Reducing the Payment Bottleneck

As you are already aware, receiving payment for goods or services is usually the most time-consuming step in the Order-To-Cash process. And, unfortunately, it involves a lot of waiting.

Our best tip to improve the time to payment is to track email deliveries with a third-party delivery service—instead of native functionality (likely your companies own email server connected to Oracle). You can even take it a step further by integrating the service with Oracle through an automation tool. Automation tools, like AventX, can display delivery status information directly in Oracle and provide even more functionality to AR teams to help manage the invoicing process, trigger Oracle workflows, and simplify manual tasks.

If you’re interested in exploring how we can streamline the Order-To-Cash Process, send us a message.