2021: A Year of Innovation for LSQ

The LSQ product and engineering teams delivered myriad enhanced funding, user experience, and security features and functionality to FastTrack in 2021.

With all the challenges companies faced in 2021, LSQ heard you when you emphasized that simplicity and agility are key components to their success in 2021. Business processes must flow seamlessly between systems. Cash must be available quickly to enable supply chains to respond with agility to the dynamic economic, supply chain and workforce disruptions. 

Leveraging more than 25 years experience delivering the liquidity needs of companies of all sizes, the LSQ product and engineering teams delivered myriad new features and enhanced functionality to LSQ FastTrack® that simplified the user experience while accelerating customers’ access to capital.

New and enhanced intuitive features delivered in 2021 include:

Total Payment Management (TPM)

With TPM, LSQ manages all buyers’ payments for enrolled suppliers, allowing the buyer to make one payment to LSQ for all their enrolled suppliers’ invoices, regardless of when it was paid (early or at term).  The payments feature enables buying organizations to save time and costs, through reduction of supplier inquiries and check processing costs.

Business Units

In 2021, FastTrack also added new functionality that allows our buyer customers with multiple business units to share an account relationship with the company at large. The new, enhanced dashboard allows buyers to be able to view and manage all their business segmentations (for example, segmented by legal entities, or even location), and invoices from a single view or filter to view one or more specific business units for greater transparency into program usage.

Credit Memo Enhancements

To quickly identify and work with credit memos, now the FastTrack dashboard presents all credit memos requiring offset in a dedicated Pending Credit Memo tab on the Invoices page. On this tab, users now see their credit memos grouped against positive invoices to offset the amount owed. 

Invoice Revocation and Resubmission

Errors happen! Sometimes, an invoice approved for early payment must be revoked or edited. Now, a buyer user may revoke, rework, and resubmit both ineligible and previously approved invoices. To simplify the supplier experience, revoked invoices appear as “ineligible” on the supplier invoices page.

Set Your Own Terms

While automated early payments is a great way to maximize your working capital opportunities, being able to predict payments may be of more importance. As buyers extend payment terms, Set Your Own Terms allows suppliers to artificially set the terms per their business requirements. For example, a buyer may increase terms to 60 or 90 days, yet for payment predictability, they may wish to continue to be paid at 45 days. Now, suppliers can automatically take advantage of early, predictable payments, while maintaining a strong trading partner relationship!

Modernized Supplier Experience

A redesign of the supplier user experience allows users to focus clearly on specific tasks, such as requesting early payment. Now, invoices, payments and early-payment options information are presented in a more typical table format with standard input fields and call to action buttons.

Supplier Dashboard

Suppliers are a key participant in any working capital program. As part of the modernization of the experience, suppliers now start their FastTrack experience in an easy-to-use, action-oriented dashboard with clear insights into liquidity opportunities. From the supplier dashboard, users can quickly identify key data points on availability of early payments, as well as reconcile recent payments. 

An intuitive, action-oriented interface would be pointless without accelerated access to funds, a unique value delivered with LSQ FastTrack.

Features delivered to accelerate access to funds and return on your LSQ investment include:

Pre-Sales Analysis

Based on years of experience and expertise, LSQ delivers an algorithmic analysis of prospective buyers’ incoming suppliers’ network to quantify and recommend suppliers for working capital program participation.  This analysis calculates your working capital opportunity as well as return-on-investment timeline  This analysis is used as an input into your customized supplier enrollment and utilization process.   

Insights

A key element to maximize liquidity is to quickly identify successes, opportunities, and issues. With buyer analytics, users now have reporting pertaining to their working capital lift, the impact on their days payable outstanding (DPO), supplier concentration and adoption of the early payment programs powered by LSQ FastTrack.

No-Code Data Submission

At the request of many customers looking to realize immediate working capital lift, LSQ allows buyer users to upload various file types onto FastTrack. This easy-to-use feature enables customers to start realizing program benefits in days instead of weeks or months.

Increase Payment Frequency

Sometimes, you need capital now! LSQ now performs three payment cycles per day, with the capability to increase frequencies as required. For amounts less than $100,000, customers can have funds when needed without having to wait a whole day; further shortening time to funding. 

While delivering simplified features, functionality and accelerated payments is core to LSQ FastTrack, forefront to LSQ product team is the security of the FastTrack platform and your data.

While many of the security process and updates are done behind the scenes, we continue to implement best practices in interface security, including:

Multi-Factor Backup Codes

LSQ FastTrack now requires users to set up multi-factor authentication using their mobile phone number for each login to FastTrack. If a user’s mobile numbers change, they misplace their phone, or authentication SMS service is offline, LSQ provides users with a one-time authentication code as an alternative authentication path.

ISO20022 Format

Payment instructions (for payment processing by banks) have been created using the new financial and global standard ISO20022 format that allows for the sending of ACH and domestic and international wires using the same file formats. This allows LSQ FastTrack to quickly stand-up new payment methods to offer our supplier customers to receive payments at different time frames depending upon their business needs.

As you can see, 2021 was a banner year for the LSQ product and engineering team! We are excited for 2022 and to continue to grow and deepen our partnerships with our customers leveraging LSQ’s industry expertise, ease of use and fast time to funding. 

For more information on how LSQ FastTrack’s new features and functionality can help your business meet its working capital needs in 2022 and beyond, please visit lsq.com.