Leading European tourism retail group + Serrala Cash Application SAP Embedded
Achieving >99% posting automation and 80% clearing automation rates with smarter cash application in SAP.
- Industry: Retail, Tourism
- Revenue: €100bn
- Employees: 300,000+
- Headquarters: Germany
Business need
Business need
A key element of this customer’s business model is its unique independent retailer structure: A network of almost 2000 self-employed retailers operate their stores under the master brand, managing their assortment and local services independently while benefiting from the infrastructure and support of the group.
This entrepreneurial model created a highly complex accounting environment: settlement processes were traditionally managed in a shared service center between a central entity and the independent retailer network. This process, which had to account for around 40,000 payments per month across 2500 different bank accounts, required significant manual effort as payments were processed collectively, making automated allocation difficult. In addition, the company’s bank statements lacked the data needed to identify and assign payments correctly. As a result, the accounting team spent about an hour each week on posting and clearing activities for each retailer in the network.
Switching to individual payment allocation wasn’t possible, because it would have led to both increased bank fees and manual workloads by generating hundreds or thousands more bank statement items.
Solution implemented
Solution implemented
To resolve these challenges, the business selected Serrala Cash Application SAP Embedded. Our approach provided something none of the other assessed vendors could: an automation platform that fully embeds in the standard SAP environment and extends its standard capabilities. This architecture allowed for the automation of the cash application and settlement process – identifying, allocating, processing, and clearing payments without human intervention – using data already housed in the ERP while also maintaining the existing collective approach to payment structuring.
This provided the company with the ability to fully automate its settlement process without significantly altering it.
Results achieved
Results achieved
After the first rollout phase, the company saw its automation rates for posting and clearing jump to over 99% and 80% respectively. This represents a significant reduction in manual processing requirements, with workloads that once took hundreds of hours every week could be completed in a fraction of the time.
As a result, settlement processes have also become fully standardized both across the shared service center and the entire network, with allocations also becoming more accurate and reliable through advanced technical validation mechanisms. High transaction volumes can be handled more efficiently even as they continue to grow, and downstream finance processes now experience fewer delays.
