We have implemented a tool called Upflow to help us manage our accounts receivables process. It not only provides us with some great internal tools to help improve the efficiency of our collections efforts, it also provides functionality our customers can access directly to help them self serve with several common needs.
How do you get access to Upflow?
Any Gem who is listed as an account owner in Salesforce will automatically be added to Upflow, with all of your accounts available to you to view. Because of the way the sync works from Salesforce, depending on your role you may need additional access to other customers, so please just ask in the #ask-accounting Slack channel and we can upgrade your views. Access to Upflow is entirely through SSO, so use the Google login option when you reach the site.
In addition to going to Upflow directly, you can also access specific customer pages within Upflow via their Details page at the account level in Salesforce. In the Admin and Billing section, there will be a field called Customer AR Portal that will take you directly to that customer’s internal Upflow page.
The internal customer page
This page will contain all of the information that we need internally to manage our customer’s open invoices and the associated collection activity. It gives us an overview of their payment history and which dunning workflows they are associated with. Dunning is a nerd term that means automated collections processes.
It also shows which payments methods are available to that customer, and will allow you to enable any that are disabled by default. For customers who have invoices greater than $10k, we disable credit cards as an option because of the associated credit card service fees for a transaction that large.
We also can see all open and paid invoices here, and who is listed as their MAIN contact, which should be their AP alias, and who holds the position of Purchaser. Any contact labeled as Purchaser will be copied on most outgoing messages related to billing, but always on the initial email and then the emails that get sent when the invoice becomes significantly delinquent. If your customer requests any additional people to be added to the CC list for invoices, you can add them in Upflow on the Contacts tab and assign them the Purchaser position. You can also change the contact designated as the MAIN contact if they give you an updated AP alias.
The other important feature of this page is the ability to create a link to an external customer portal page that you can send to your customer. This is done via the Preview customer portal link in the upper left part of the page.
This is an externally accessible, tokenized page that your customers can access directly. The URL is tokenized so it will expire after 7 days, but we include a new link in every dunning email we send. This page is where you customers can go to download account statements, see their open and paid invoices, and make a payment via the credit card or ACH processing options that Upflow enables for us via Stripe.
If they use the message box on this page, it will send an email to ar@gem.com.
You can review the Upflow overview we gave at All Hands here.
- How do you get access to Upflow?
- The internal customer page