Boleto Based Reconciliation & Payments Settlement Strategy
Problem Statement
The player was facing significant issues with monthly reconciliations and payments from the hotel partners.
The monthly reconciliations were extended to more than 5 days in the beginning of the month with issue resolutions taking up further 5 to 10 days.
The player was anticipating hiring more workforce to support the workload. They were also looking to find a better method of mapping payments to vendors in the bank statements.
Core Findings
The player used a Boleto based system that is quite unique to Brazil.
The Boletos were sent to the hotel partners along with the invoices and they were required to process the payments using the Boletos.
The team used to generate Boleto's with the month-end invoices and send to the hotel owners.
The was no process of mapping those payments to the partner hotels.
Steps To Resolution
We created a detailed process maps of the monthly activities by investing significant time with the involved teams.
We studied in detail how the Boleto based payments system works.
We established a coding methodology to marking each boleto with parameters such as vendor code, month of invoice and area code.
This code reflected in the bank statements whenever the payments were made.
Impact
The bank reconciliation process was brought down from 5 days to below 2 hours.
The issue resolution process was brought down to 2 days.
The process was made headcount agnostic and the need for hiring more people in proportion with increasing transactions was mitigated.
The settlement rate increased by 10x and timely settlements resulted in improved working capital management.
REGION - BRAZIL
CLIENT INDUSTRY - HOSPITALITY