It’s an exciting time for South African retailers, banks and MNOs to grow their digital product offerings as more consumers than ever before are looking to buy goods like airtime and electricity online. However, as these portfolios grow, the financial processes that underpin them become increasingly complicated. Here’s how Electrum’s all-in-one back-office tool can help not only streamline reconciliation and reporting for your VAS channels, but maximise your business value too.

It goes without saying that reconciliation, settlement and reporting are essential processes for businesses. Research shows, and our experience with clients confirms, that finance operations in the digital goods and services world hold major pain points for accounting teams:

• Inability to access quality financial data for VAS offerings

• Inefficient automation processes resulting in high levels of human intervention

• Not enough dedicated time to explore and fix the root cause of problems

• Difficulty maintaining an audit trail

• Reliance on tools like Excel, which introduces additional complexity and creates more room for error

• High turnaround time on changes and new implementations

These pain points – if unaddressed– can impact your monthly operational costs, your ability to scale, your team’s efficiency and the overall wellbeing of your employees.

Recon reinvented

A streamlined end-to-end reconciliation process is key to help your business not only keep up, but also thrive in the rapidly evolving world of digital goods and services.

Electrum’s Back Office tool makes building a holistic transaction flow easier by integrating reconciliation and matching processes from the beginning. This allows matching, discrepancy detection and settlement to become part of the overall transaction journey – not something tacked on at the end - and can help finance teams in the following ways:

Speed to market and dynamic changes

Quick configuration of new service providers unblocks the initial speed to market and ensures a quick rollout of new deployments. Further to an easy implementation, dynamic updates also help to avoid waiting months for changes to different file inputs, outputs and automation rules.

Access to the full transaction journey simplifies data gathering

With access to the full flow – from point of origin to third party – finding the right data becomes easier. Without the need to comb through different sources, or piece together mismatched information, your accounting teams can get their jobs done faster.

Greater accuracy with a configurable matching engine

With automated-matching technology underpinning the transaction journey, your team can configure matching rules and manage the existing matching criteria to set up and support more complex rules with the support of the Electrum team. Getting this right minimises the need for human intervention, saves time, reduces room for error, and allows your team members more time to focus on other business tasks.

Ensure compliance with a user audit trail

A log of user actions combined with a two-step authorisation workflow ensures you have a record of manual intervention for auditing purposes.

Flexible data output and reporting for your business needs

The tool allows you to easily input data from any source file, which allows for both custom reporting to suit your specifications, as well as standard reporting that can be consumed by 3rd party tools, i.e. BI tools, ERP, etc.

Real-time summary on recon and financial operations

The tool provides a spotlight view of volumes, error cases, file-processing issues and the value of the transactions and settlements moving through your system to help you get the information you need faster.

If you’d like to find out more about how Electrum’s Back Office tool can help your finance team maximise value for your VAS business, reach out to us here!