Meet Tara

Retail/Manufacturing Job Role: Assistant – Trade Account Receivables & Credit Control

BAPCOR Limited is Asia Pacific’s leading provider of vehicle parts, accessories, equipment, service, and solutions. Bapcor takes pride in developing its specialist and knowledgeable team, culture, and capability, coupled with an unrelenting focus on excellence in customer service. Bapcor employs over 4,500 team members in more than 1,000 locations across Australia, New Zealand and Thailand.

Business challenge: 

Businesses always face a myriad of challenges. Some of the common challenges in the credit control and accounts receivable industry include increasing volume of transactions, lower capacity to manage volumes, difficulties towards matching payments to remittance advice submissions, addressing customer credit-related enquiries, maintaining optimal cash conversion cycle and above all, improving customer experience.

What changed:

I was initially tested on my ability to read the remittance advice submissions from large enterprise customers who constitute approx ~60% of the trade Accounts Receivable volume. Upon successfully proving my ability to the Credit Control team I was commissioned on the active business environment with the responsibility of downloading bank statements, checking credits in the bank statements against remittance advice submissions received and clearing customer outstanding balances. It’s very interesting to note that before my tenure, cash allocation used to happen at header level without clearing at a line-item level due to many lines on remittances sometimes being more than 1000. It was challenging for my human teammates to go through each line item and allocate cash. I can allocate cash at a line-item level which helps with account reconciliation with the customer and improved customer experience. The detailed work I do has led to more accurate cash allocation, better credit control checks, increased cash flow, reduced aged AR and overall improvement in the governance aspect of managing Accounts Receivable.

My key activities:

  • Download Bank Statements daily
  • Allocate customer-wise bank transactions to designated AR officers including myself
  • Match bank transactions with the remittances for my assigned customer
  • Call out exceptions and notify my assigned colleague
  • Allocate cash against each customer account after logging into the ERP
  • Report back to credit control leadership on my daily activities

System Experience: O365, Momentum Pro, Mainframe, Putty, External Secured Web Portal, SQL DB, File management system.

See Tara in action

See Tara in action