Remittance Processing: Upgraded Technology, Upgrade Revenue

By Vicki Amendola

So you've heard the old cliché about winning the battle and losing the war, right? I recently spoke to one VAR that holds the contrasting opinion-losing the occasional battle may actually win the war. Mackin Imaging, a Metasource company, offers solutions and services focused on data entry, data capture, and image retrieval. In 2002, Pepperidge farm sent out an RFP to outsource scanning of all of its driver delivery tickets. Mackin Imaging lost this particular battle to a competitor offering on-site scanning services, but its demonstration of AnyDoc software ultimately won the war. Impressed with the functionality of the AnyDoc application, Pepperidge Farm led the VAR into a cash application department struggling with outdated OCR(optical character recognition) technology instead. The relationship would prove to be a lucrative and lasting one, with the VAR performing not one upgrade, but two in the span of three short years. Pepperidge Farm delivers baked goods across the county to both large retailer and small, local stores. The drivers of its extensive distribution network obtain signed delivery tickets, which are used to invoice the retailer for each individual shipment. "The challenge for Pepperidge Farm was the larger customers, such as Wal-Mart, do not pay invoices singularly. They typically lump hundreds of them together and make one big payment," says Mario Duckett, VP of sles at Mackin Imaging. "The staff in the cash application department averaged a 60-day backlog of unapplied payments." Unapplied payments that still need to be credited to the corresponding invoice, even though the remittance check has been deposited.