Outsourcing: The Path to
High-Performance Finance?

CFOs Find Mixed Delivery Approach is Key to Success

For CFOs seeking to improve the performance of finance departments, their best efforts can frequently be derailed by the inefficiency of routine finance and accounting tasks. These repetitive, administrative functions, such as invoice processing and check printing, are rarely core to the business, yet critical nonetheless. What many CFOs are finding on their quest to high-performance finance, however, is that these transaction-intensive processes also make the best choices for outsourcing.

Despite a polarizing decade of hype and horror stories over financial process outsourcing, Gartner researchers noted in a recent study that successful firms are most likely to utilize a combination of delivery models as they move toward financial Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), in which firms turn over back-office functions, including routine finance and accounting tasks, to outside vendors.

What can be learned from this phased approach is that utilizing an outsourced financial process provider to handle transaction and invoice processing can not only help to achieve operational performance improvements, but can also lead the way to technological advancements within the organization. This is due in large part to the fact that outsourcing offers organizations a unique opportunity to partner with experienced service providers and technology vendors as they re-organize and re-engineer internal processes — taking palatable steps toward efficient AP automation.

Exploring the Options
Before fully committing to outsourcing finance and accounting functions, enterprises should carefully consider the primary factors driving the decision. Will outsourcing enable the organization to refocus key resources on the core business? Improve service levels throughout the organization? Will it benefit from industry best practices and reduced transaction costs? Once these questions have been addressed, enterprises must then identify the specific processes, such as those involving payments, that they would want to outsource.

In response to the strategic business goals of its customers, today Bottomline Technologies offers a host of outsourcing options for payment and invoice processing designed to:

• Create value through access to best practice payment processes;
• Reduce overall processing costs by leveraging economies of scale;
• Offload the requirement for infrastructure, on-site printing equipment and paper stock;
• Manage the transition from high-cost paper to lower-cost electronic payment processes;
• Address unanticipated business disruption.

Bottomline's outsourced services for financial processes include:

Outsourced Payments: A convenient, cost-effective way for corporations to handle both the physical production and delivery of high-volume check runs, as well as a broad range of electronic payments. Bottomline's service builds upon a 15-year history of innovative financial process automation solutions to provide valuable Web-based tools and workflow capabilities.

Services range from a secure browser-based view of transaction and invoice history to distributed payment requests with local printing and portals that allow authorized payees to view payment status online. Sophisticated workflow mapping, coupled with locally-controlled signature and application files, provides customers with a 'best of breed' solution for their payments needs.

Outsourced Invoicing: Many current Bottomline customers produce hundreds of thousands or even millions of invoices and statements annually. By outsourcing this function to Bottomline, they can maximize postal discounts, eliminate on-site printing headaches and enjoy significant economies of scale. They also take advantage of outsourced AP capabilities upstream of the payments process, such as invoice receipt, imaging, discrepancy and resolution handling, distribution, processing and reporting.

Disaster Recovery: Bottomline's Disaster Recovery Service provides peace of mind to risk management professionals — an inexpensive and effective insurance policy to help keep your business running smoothly if your facilities or network are damaged or destroyed. These services provide independent facilities, eliminating the need to configure sites in remote locations; complete platform capabilities for paper checks, positive pay and electronic payments; and periodic testing.

For more information and a proposal on Bottomline's outsourced financial process services, contact your local Bottomline representative at 1-800-472-1321 for a consultation.