• CFOs that don’t streamline data collection and business processes will struggle to produce accurate, timely reports.
  • Modern companies are investing in applications to accomplish specific functions: CRM, accounting, billing, etc. Too often application integration is an afterthought.
  • This read focuses on two critical metrics: bookings and cash, showing how integration is critical. By thinking through an integration strategy for the systems that manage L2C, CFOs can avoid tedious report preparation and focus on the results.

What Is Lead-to-Cash?

L2C is the end-to-end, top-level business process that begins with marketing and ends with revenue collection. Stages along the way include sales management, CPQ (configure, price and quote), customer service, project management, order management, and revenue management.

The L2C process starts when Marketing has identified potential new business, and data is created in an application. That data flows through the sales, order management, and billing processes and ends up as a transaction — cash in the bank. Along the way there can be a dozen or more business applications that augment or alter the data, create transactions and provide insight to the health 0of the business.

Though there are many metrics that either measure or are outputs from this important business process, two that the board most want are typically bookings and cash. Where a revenue operations manager or controller can report with footnotes or nuance internally, finance leaders need to report accurate data on time with confidence.

Efforts to improve L2C are often borne from initiatives to make the process more efficient. The focus may be on resources or time to process orders, and automation is employed to accomplish more with fewer people. While this is laudable, the quality and timeliness of the data should be the primary concern. As more applications and staff interact with data as it travels through the L2C process, data can decay, humans can make adjustments that lead to inaccuracy, and the result is an incomplete picture.

In a L2C process integrated at the application level, data is not lost or subject to decay and staff are focused on exception handling. If a complete record for an entity (i.e. a customer record) or transaction is passed from one system to the next, the receiving party can fully utilize the breadth of data for reporting and analysis of th...