Webinar interview on 20 October 2022 with Doris Pieters, Accounts Receivables Supervisor, on how Amka allocate customer payments in SAP quickly and accurately with the BEST Debtors Remit and Remittance Reader modules.

Amka is a South African company with over 60 years in the Health and Beauty Industry. Their Vision is to be “Brand leaders in the Health, Beauty and Home Care Industry.” Their purpose is “To enrich people’s lives by creating and sharing abundance.” Visit www.amka.co.za to find out more.

Prior to BEST, the payment allocation process was long and cumbersome. There are a large number of claims such as from Dis-Chem (300 – 400 per Remittance) and these would take hours to manually load in SAP. Pick n Pay, another large retailer, would take us a day to clear their Remittance. Our largest customer, Shoprite has 40 000 line items per month on their Remittance and this would take us 2 to 3 days to load and clear.

Now we email the Remittance to BEST Remittance Reader for reading, the converted file with all line items is returned in the correct format for loading into Debtors Remit. Once the Remittance is uploaded, the Remittance lines auto clear and payments are allocated automatically in SAP. You can also upload Excel Remittances – so BEST Debtors Remit caters for different file formats. No more manual capturing is required as all is done via the Remittance load (10 min activity) into BEST. One just has to work with what is left in the account.

Once BEST was implemented a year ago for selected Clients, our Customer Clearing process is faster, simplified and accurate – we have not looked back. We are saving days, loading Remittances which used to take hours but now takes minutes. Shoprite Remittance clearing takes the longest – 30mins versus the hours and days it took previously.

BEST provides more time to the Amka AR team for query resolution and we can focus on debt collection. In addition our Auditors love the system.

Initially we looked at the top 20 to 30 customers – with the approach being to focus on customers with high transaction volumes, unusual remittances, export remittances and those with settlement discounts.

To date, we have now mapped 61 unique Customers through our OCR tool to load their remittances into SAP via BEST Debtors Remit. A total of 157 Remittances have been loaded with a total of 9,440 remittances lines posted to the customer accounts. Of these line items, only 12 remain open on the Customer accounts – being claims to be processed. This represents a cleared percentage of 99.9% of the remittance lines.

To achieve the 97% Clearing Rate takes minimal effort. Send the Remittance email and BEST does the rest. No manual activity, no finger trouble, no effort at all. Most time is spent sending the email to BEST and getting the converted file back in a few minutes. It is all so easy.

Communication with our clients has also improved due to the accuracy of payment allocations, quicker and more accurate statement issue and the AR team can resolve queries quicker. We also get more money in quicker. We highly recommend the BEST Debtors Remit module to Debtors departments and FMCG companies in particular given their high Remittance line items and volumes.

Thank you Doris for your input and Eventful People for setting up this Webinar! https://www.eventfulpeople.com/

Download the BEST Case Study – Amka Debtors Remit.

Find out more on how to automate clearing of customer payments in SAP with BEST Debtors Remit.