What Is Revenue Assurance
Revenue is the pulse of every business, driving profitability, fueling growth, and empowering organisations to meet their financial commitments to stakeholders. Whether an organisation is a startup or a global enterprise, its ability to generate and protect revenue is essential for fulfilling financial obligations to shareholders, employees, and partners. The revenue cycle, from product development to invoicing and final collection, is central to value creation and, ultimately, protects the viability of the organisation.
In light of the above, Revenue Assurance can help in preventing recurring leakages of revenue and in maximising both cash flow and revenue by regularly identifying discrepancies and opportunities of improvement across the lifecycle. Examples of Revenue Assurance mechanisms include embedded controls in the sales process to trigger actions around leads and transactions completion, similarly for revenue processes integrating system and manual controls to prevent, detect and analyze transactional discrepancies, recurring audits by specialised Revenue Assurance teams to identify issues and areas of improvement, automated procedures carried out by AI software platforms to detect inconsistencies between applied and approved contractual terms, etc.
Benefit to your organisation
The PwC approach combines proven methodologies with new technologies, leveraging data analysis and machine learning to automate controls that can support in mitigating revenue leakage risks across various transaction scales, down to a micro level. Our approach is based on a framework that includes five key pillars:
Current state assessment
Perform thorough audits to pinpoint areas prone to revenue leakage.
Control design testing
Execute rigorous control tests, including stress scenarios.
Revenue Assurance analysis and validation
Apply advanced analytics and machine learning for transactional scrutiny and data integrity, focusing on anomaly detection and pattern analysis to unearth hidden revenue leaks.
Detailed transactions' review
Utilise targeted software to audit individual transactions, ensuring each complies with relevant pricing and contractual terms.
Framework development and implementation
Implement a system defining roles and automating monitoring for proactive revenue management.
Services
- Function activation
- Maturity assessment
- Controls health check
- Framework development
- Internal audit and assessment
- Training and education
Function activation
Assisting organisations in setting up or reactivating a dedicated Revenue Assurance function to identify and prevent revenue leakages across key processes.
Lina El Deek
Partner - Risk Services, PwC Middle East
