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Where Digital Transformation and automation has taken over in most business areas from customer experience to sales and marketing , AR has somehow been left behind . People are still working off Excel spreadsheets , filling in payment details on a piece of paper or a postit , and trying to make a dent in money owed by picking up the phone .

Part of the challenge has been that businesses have traditionally seen AR as largely transactional and unlikely to benefit in a genuinely powerful way from digital re-imagining – thus the area has often been neglected .

The past year and emerging technological trends have proven this thesis wrong and 2021 will likely see a shift that will see the potential of AR unlocked by CIOs , CMOs and CFOs hungry for improved cash flows , secure transactions and additional channels through which to reach and retain the people they do business with .

Cash is now king more than ever before in a post-COVID world because of the inherent business failure risk but bringing that cash in will depend on harnessing the human relationships with the customers who owe money – something that a digital-human blend solution , something we have identified as a relationship engine , enables . A purely manual system , ironically , does not accomplish this because the sheer volume of work makes the human unable to be human when it counts .

One of the drivers of this change toward digital in AR has been the disruption caused by COVID . Typically , the manual nature of AR could be overlooked because it was largely done on-premise . COVID forced a near instant transition to a remote workforce and suddenly employees were being sent home with computers covered with sticky notes . Overnight we saw a demand to apply the same cloud answers for AR that had already been applied to other areas of the business .

In 2021 , we will see this trend toward cloud support for the AR department accelerate , but it will likely become more measured and strategic , less reactionary since 2020 taught organisations the limitations of outof-the-box solutions and the critical need to incorporate security and data integration into the process . The lesson from 2020 will be that the wrong approach plants the seed of trouble down the road .

2020 also showed many organisations the need for an ability to be able to nimbly

OVERNIGHT WE SAW A DEMAND TO APPLY THE SAME CLOUD ANSWERS FOR AR THAT HAD ALREADY BEEN APPLIED TO OTHER AREAS OF THE BUSINESS .