Times of upheaval are always times of radical change. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many organisations around the globe suddenly found themselves in a position where they had to introduce remote working policies to protect their staff and customers.
As important as it is to safeguard employees, organisations must also take further measures to protect their operational viability. For many companies, this means deploying new digital business solutions – powerful communication, collaboration and data sharing tools that allow them to keep scaling, growing and maintaining profitable relationships with both internal teams and external partners. Like all other operations, rebate programmes still need to be managed effectively in these uniquely challenging times.
Adopting a cloud-based rebate management system delivered as a SaaS will enable your employees who are responsible for managing rebates, to work from home – and have even better access to the information they need to do their jobs than if they were still using legacy systems at the office.
THE RIGHT TOOLS FOR REMOTE WORK
Mastering work from home policies rely on utilising the right tools to keep your employees productive and connected. Unfortunately, manual processes such as using spreadsheets for managing rebates are not conducive to remote working productivity. The reason, of course, is that managing numerous rebate programmes between numerous business partners is a highly complex affair, reliant on the ready availability of up-to-the minute data that must be passed between many different stakeholders for validation and approval quickly and often.
Relying on outdated processes, such as spreadsheets and an eternal game of email ping pong is not efficient at the best of times – and trying to do so whilst adjusting to working from home is a recipe for disaster. Manual data maintenance is extremely time-consuming and open to human error. Relying on such a basic rebate management system may well mean you are forgoing workflows, approvals and auditing of changes – especially in an environment where your team members are now working remotely from one another. In addition, spreadsheet systems often lack reporting capabilities and integration with other systems, meaning that all your data must be – once again – manually imported into a user-maintained access database.
Due to the current economic climate, it is likely that rates could change quite frequently. Maintaining these price changes by hand across an entire, non-integrated system is inherently susceptible to errors, omissions, duplications, miscalculations and oversights – particularly when your team members are not able to collaborate and communicate with each other in person. As a consequence, inaccuracies can begin to seep in, leading to missed opportunities that impact everything from reporting and forecasting, to cash flow and audit compliance. Additionally, without a better way to manage your rebate programmes remotely, validation turnaround time may well start to become painstakingly slow, negatively impacting your relationships with trading partners.
The Benefits of a SaaS Rebate Management System
Implementing a cloud-based rebate management system enables you to roll out an efficient and collaborative remote work programme, which can solve your long-standing rebate management pain points at once.
For starters, with a SaaS rebate management system, all of your contracts and agreements are centralised in the cloud, providing a single source of truth that can be accessed by anyone with the right permissions at any time – from anywhere and from any device – ensuring that everyone has access to the information they need, no matter where they are. Additionally, a purpose-built rebate management system completely eliminates the need to rely on spreadsheets to track rebates and perform endless manual calculations. In fact, the best SaaS solutions on the market today automate these tasks and fully integrate with your existing systems. This means they process all your rebate data in real time – recalculating the rebate if historical data is amended – to give your whole team immediate, accurate results, even when working remotely.
Another crucial aspect of operations that may be impacted by work from home arrangements is approvals and workflows. Any changes that occur to a rebate of course need to be audited, with approvals granted at the appropriate level. A robust, cloud-based rebate management system will streamline these processes with configurable workflow engines. These allow you to segregate important duties to ensure key actions taken within the system are authorised at the right level. In addition, automated reminders and notifications will alert key stakeholders on their personal devices whenever their actions are required, ensuring that all rebate agreements are being proactively managed by the right people no matter where they are working.
Improve Remote Work Collaboration and Efficiency with e-bate – The Ultimate Rebate Management System
In these times where remote work is rapidly becoming the new normal, a cloud-based rebate management system will improve the rebate management operations at your organisation in multiple ways – from eliminating spreadsheet reliance, to improving collaboration across departments and increasing access to your company’s rebate data.
e-bate can help you do all this and more, allowing you to quickly adapt to new arrangements where your teams are increasingly working from home and require sophisticated tools to manage your rebate programmes efficiently, accurately and effectively.
Our intuitive rebate management system, delivered as a SaaS, can be accessed from anywhere and automates every element of the rebate process. e-bate comes with a built-in calculation engine that enables you to easily calculate all types of rebate and track and analyse data against those agreements in real time. Meanwhile, our configurable workflow engine with automated alerts and notifications ensures your remote work processes are streamlined, auditable and that you never miss an action that may impact your business. e-bate is your single source of all rebate information, providing you with the tools you need to help your team work and collaborate from anywhere and make proactive decisions that drive business value.
Request a demo or get in touch today to find out more about how e-bate can simplify and improve your rebate management
