ES&E used to learn that an invoice was broken only once it had already gone overdue, sometimes 90 or 120 days later. Now an AI agent files across every customer AP portal, surfaces a problem within 24 hours, and gets ES&E paid on time, every time.
"We've made quite the turnaround in terms of our AR group's position on the customer's AP portals, and they absolutely love it."
About ES&E
ES&E distributes industrial and machine automation to manufacturers, and it looks for new technology rather than waiting for it. It had already put an AI project into production on its order entry before it turned to receivables. Of the roughly 2,000 customers it does business with, a small but growing number require their invoices through a customer AP portal, and that segment already accounts for 10 to 15% of receivables. Those portal invoices were also the ones the company could see the least about, and the slowest to turn into cash, right up until Monto.
Meet Donald and Mark
Donald Henry is ES&E’s Controller and runs receivables. He owns the before and after: the daily portal work, the visibility gaps, and the collections that kept slipping. Mark Sellers, ES&E’s Sales Manager, drove the AI transformation in the finance department, and cost-cutting was never the point. “We made the move not from an automation perspective, but from a personnel perspective,” he said. “We wanted to free up the time of the people in our AR group so they could do things that were more productive. And it certainly accomplished that.”
The Challenge
An invoice could stall for up to 120 days before ES&E catches it
The first ES&E heard of a stalled invoice was a late payment. Inside a customer’s AP portal, an invoice could stall over a mistyped PO or a PO with no money left on it, problems specific to that customer’s system, and with no single place to check status across the portals, it could sit that way for weeks before anyone caught it. Donald remembers how long it took to catch one. “We may not even know until like 90 to 120 days, until it was actually due,” he said. “And then we’d call, and they’d say, such and such was wrong. So we wouldn’t even know.”
On a customer with 60 or 90-day terms, that blind spot got expensive. A customer’s payment clock only starts once the invoice is correctly in their portal, so weeks lost to a hidden error can push the whole term back, and a problem caught at 90 days could mean waiting another 60 or 90 days to get paid. As Mark put it, it “basically doubles your receivable time or DSO for those customers that have extended terms.”
Underneath the visibility gap sat the manual work. Two people on the AR team logged into every customer AP portal, every day, keying invoices one by one. Mark said the portal work “was just layered on top of what their regular duties were.” It wasn’t what they were hired to do; collections was the job. As more of ES&E’s customers moved to portals, the keying grew, and the accounts that needed chasing were left waiting. It reached past AR, too: with collections stuck behind portal work, the sales team pitched in to chase receivables, time they would rather have spent with customers and new deals.
"We didn't know we had a problem until after the 90 days were up, and it didn't get paid. That was our indicator that there was a problem."
The Monto Solution
An enterprise-grade AI agent runs every ES&E invoice from the ERP to payment
ES&E found Monto through the AI project, which it was already running with Esker for order entry, and when it moved to automate the portal side of receivables, Monto was the best fit.
ES&E didn’t take on software to run. It got a result: every invoice filed and tracked to payment across every customer AP portal, with no one logging in. Monto builds a rich context layer for each of ES&E’s customers, then runs enterprise-grade AI agents on top of it. The agent reads each invoice from ES&E’s ERP, submits it in the exact format required by the customer’s portal, and then tracks the PO and payment status. When a customer spans multiple portals, the agent works out where each invoice goes. One of ES&E’s largest customers runs across three separate portals, and Monto routes each invoice to the right one by its PO prefix, something the team used to sort out by hand. When the agent isn’t sure, it stops and asks the AR team, then folds that answer back in, so it handles more on its own the next time. Donald liked that it bent to each customer’s setup. “We really like Monto because of the fact that it has that flexibility,” he said.
The biggest change was visibility. “Today, we send invoices every morning. Takes less than 60 seconds,” Mark said. “We start getting kickbacks, so our AR team works on those kickbacks, which is very little time.” The team’s job flipped: from filing every invoice to reviewing the handful that need a person. The team now catches a bad PO within a day or two, while the details are still fresh. Once they resolve an exception, Monto keeps the fix and applies it to the next invoice, so the same issue doesn’t come back.
Setting up Monto was quick. Donald handed over credentials for each portal, with no IT involved, and zero-touch climbed fast from there. “That was maybe a week or two weeks of implementation, and we were rolling at that point,” Mark said. “We went from right at 50% after the first week, and it jumped up to the mid-70s real quick, probably by the end of September.” Zero-touch submissions hold at 90% today. The early friction, mostly credentials and customers not yet defined in Monto, cleared within a few months.
The Impact
AI moved the AR team from hours of invoice filing to minutes of exception review
"Those invoices in each portal every day were taking at least two hours. Today, with Monto, it takes up to two minutes."
- 90% of invoices are filed with zero touch. Before Monto, every invoice used to be work: a portal login and a manual submission, one at a time. With Monto, almost none of them need a person, whether they upload as submitted or Monto corrects them first. “Now they are able to do collections,” Donald said. One recently reduced 50 past-due accounts to three.
- 810+ hours back to the AR team since go-live. With the morning keying handled, the two people who ran the portals get back three to four hours a day for collections and the accounts that had been waiting.
- 1.7% rejection rate, and still falling. Fewer than two in every hundred invoices are rejected, down from 2.2% at the end of 2025 to 1.1% in the first half of 2026. Monto catches problems early, so invoices clear while they are still current, and ES&E gets paid closer to terms. As Mark put it, “Now we’re much closer to terms with many of our portal customers.”
- Every portal and every past due in one AI-ready dashboard. ES&E’s team no longer hunts for statuses across separate portals. Monto brings every customer’s AP portal into that one view, with past dues visible across all of them.
None of these gains came at anyone’s expense. “We didn’t do Monto to eliminate anyone or eliminate any jobs,” Mark said. “It’s really an attempt on our side to stay headcount neutral as we continue to grow our business.” He has since recommended Monto to several others in his distributor network. “We’ve recommended the platform to four or five different people,” he said. For Mark, the numbers make the case: “It’s nothing but positive feedback from our side. The data is not lying.”
"To say that we're satisfied with it, I think, is an understatement. I think we're pretty ecstatic about the solution."