Diversey India spearheads industry digitalisation with innovative treasury solutions

Diversey India Hygiene Private Limited (Diversey) is a leading provider of hygiene and cleaning solutions in India, serving the hospitality, healthcare, food and beverage, retail, and facility management industries.

The challenge

Diversey maintains a direct sales model in India where sales proceeds from dealers, distributors and end customers were predominantly made through paper cheques and electronic fund transfers, resulting in a highly manual reconciliation process.

Committed to digital transformation to ensure that operations are smoother, smarter and more secure, Diversey sought to address the following objectives, with the goal of fully digitalising manual processes:

• Initiate outstanding invoices to dealers and distributors ahead of time, which would allow them to validate invoices and pre-fund accounts ahead of payment due dates.
• Automate receivables reconciliation. Done on the last working day of each month, Diversey reconciliation process involves handling post-dated cheques that took two working days to realise the credit. This resulted in accounting of collections to spill over into the next month.
• Shift to digital payments. With a network predominantly made up of small to mid-size entities from different parts of the country, Diversey’s dealers and distributors preferred manual/paper-based payment method.

The solution

Diversey worked with HSBC India (HSBC) to digitalise its processes through a comprehensive solution that combines the use of virtual accounts with a pre-debit alert mechanism to streamline invoicing, collections and reconciliation.

With pre-debit alerts set up through National Automated Clearing House (NACH) Debit, invoice notifications can now be sent to Diversey’s dealers and distributors (dealers / distributors) two working days prior to the invoice due day, allowing dealers/distributors to validate invoices and pre-fund accounts ahead of payments. The use of NACH debit further reduces fund realisation time to within the same day.

With virtual accounts, Diversey can now identify remitters with ease, and the use of customized feed reports receivables allows payments from dealers and distributors to be mapped against corresponding transactions in Diversey’s own ERP system, automating reconciliation efforts.

With the solutions above, Diversey has been able to digitalize processes for both the company and its dealers/distributors, creating a win-win situation for all parties, and promote digitalization and transition an industry that has remained heavily paper based.

Success

The solution has helped promote digitalisation in an industry that has remained heavily paper-based, marking a win-win for both Diversey and its dealers / distributors with benefits that include:

• Same-day collections for improved working capital management
• Reduced cheque use delivers savings on time, cost and resources
• Fully automated end-to-end receivables reconciliation
• Seamless integration with Diversey’s own ERP system
• Improved convenience, visibility and experience for customers
• Minimised payment disputes

Diversey India Hygiene Private Limited is a winner of The Asset Triple A Treasurise Awards 2024 in the Best Payments and Collections category for the Education, NGO & Services sector in India.