Guide to Order-to-Cash Automation

Order-to-cash automation is the end-to-end, multi-step process of connecting and automating receiving, managing, processing, and completing ecommerce and retail orders and recognizing payment. You can automate many stages, from start to finish, including receiving orders, payment processing, invoicing, fulfillment, and bookkeeping and reconciliation. At each stage, there are multiple applications and systems that need to transfer data to each other, such as storefronts and marketplaces, prescriptions and payments, ERP, and fulfillment.

Table of Contents

• Order-to-cash automation is more critical than ever
• How to decide if you need order-to-cash automation
• Benefits of automating order-to-cash
• How the Celigo platform automates order-to-cash
• How Celigo can help

Order-to-cash automation is more critical than ever

Ecommerce sales have been steadily increasing for years, as more consumers are now shopping online. Global ecommerce sales are expected to reach $5 trillion in 2022 and $6 trillion by 2024. Additionally, more retail stores are enhancing their omnichannel customer experience by offering curbside and in-store pick-up for items purchased online. In 2020, buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS) grew by 106.9%.

Order-to-cash process is a key business part of ecommerce and retail, and it spans across multiple isolated systems and applications. Integrating key apps and automating the business process end-to-end lets you scale your operations, quickly fulfill orders and process payments, and reduce the manual, error-prone, processes that lead to poor customer experience.

How to decide if you need order-to-cash automation

Celigo automation experts have worked with thousands of ecommerce and retail companies that process customer orders.

To achieve business objectives, we found business operations teams need real-time insight into these questions:

• How often do your customers face delays and mistakes during order processing?
• How many employees work with data entry, repetitive tasks, and error management?
• Do you always have the correct inventory levels for top-selling products?
• What is your volume of transactions, and are you outgrowing your internal resources?
• Do you have accurate visibility into your cash flows to make strategic decisions?
• How many hours does your accounting and finance team spend reconciling payouts during the month-end close?
• How many technical resources are focused on low-level technical work versus strategic, revenue-generating initiatives?

Benefits of automating order-to-cash

Automating the order-to-cash process allows companies to quickly scale with growing order volumes to improve customer experience, accelerate growth, and reduce operational costs.

• Gain real-time visibility into inventory to maintain healthy levels
• Optimize order processing for an excellent customer experience
• Eliminate errors to reduce sales and finance costs
• Improve financial visibility by reducing the month-end close time

How the Celigo platform automates order-to-cash

You can make the most of your resources using a federated automation model. The IT team has an overhead of the entire organization and maintains data governance, while the line-of-business users create and manage the automations that directly impact their work and team. Celigo’s unique process-centric approach enables ecommerce and retail companies to automate and optimize processes at scale.

Speed up order processing by connecting ecommerce storefronts, marketplaces, ERP, 3PL, and payment gateways.
Fulfill orders, and process cancellations, returns, and refunds fast through real-time sync of critical data between sales channels and ERP.
Avoid selling out-of-stock items to customers through up-to-date inventory levels across all sales channels.

How Celigo can help

Celigo automates every stage of your business

Celigo provides full coverage with a comprehensive library of solutions built to support ecommerce and retail business processes. With managed, prebuilt solutions, you can leverage AI/machine learning to manage and assist in integrations, including self-healing and error management.

Experts in ecommerce process automation

With over a decade of experience and thousands of ecommerce customers, Celigo is the leader in ecommerce process automation. With Celigo, you get end-to-end ecommerce coverage with expert guidance and customizable business best practices.

A powerful, scalable platform

The Celigo platform has all the power you need to handle any complex integration or transaction volume. Integrate all of your ecommerce and retail applications, automate your business processes, scale your business, and say goodbye to operational inefficiencies.

Accessible to everyone

An intuitive UI empowers business users to self-serve and manage automations without coding. Easy-to-use monitoring and error management means you don’t have to rely on technical resources to run your business.

Confidence in handling Black Friday/Cyber Monday demand

With our platform’s proven scalability, handling large volumes of transactions during peak sales seasons will no longer need to be an operational bottleneck.