How You Get Paid Has Changed. Your AR Workflow Hasn’t.

Getting paid used to follow a predictable path. You emailed an invoice, your customer’s accounts payable (AP) team keyed it in, and a check or an ACH transfer landed somewhere inside your terms. When it ran late, someone on your accounts receivable (AR) team picked up the phone and called a person they knew by name.

On paper, the job is the same as it always was. You send the invoice, track it, and follow up on any overdue items. What has changed is everything that happens after you hit send: your customers have rebuilt how they pay, while the old AR playbook keeps running as if they hadn’t.

Most coverage of B2B payment trends fixates on rails: real-time payments, virtual cards, ACH versus wire. Useful if you run a treasury. For the team that collects the money, the shift that matters is the quieter one. Payment stopped being something your customer sends you and became something you retrieve from their system, on their terms.

How did B2B payments used to work?

For years, getting paid followed a simple, personal rhythm, and the B2B payment methods that supported it were straightforward.

Your AR team had visibility into all of it precisely because the process was so simple, with one channel in and one channel out. You could predict fairly well when the cash would arrive, and on the rare occasions you couldn’t, you could pick up the phone and ask.

Which B2B payment trends are reshaping how you get paid?

Two B2B payment trends reshaped how you get paid, and neither arrived with any warning for your AR team: payments moved into your customers’ AP portals, and your customers automated their own AP.

Payments moved into your customers’ AP portals

Your largest customers moved their payment methods into customer AP portals such as Coupa, Ariba, and Tungsten. They did it for good reasons: control, standardization, and cleaner audit trails on their side. To get paid, you now log into their platform and submit in the exact format they require. Then you follow their approval workflow. Every portal has its own rules. A single missing field can leave an invoice waiting, or send it to a rejection queue.

For most AR teams, the shift clicks with one long-time customer. They will only accept invoices through their portal. A payment you were counting on stalls until you submit it the right way. That is when getting paid stops being about sending an invoice, and starts being about knowing each customer’s system.

Your customers automated their AP

The bigger shift is about who, or what, handles your invoice once it lands. Your customer’s AP used to be people. Someone keyed it in, someone approved it, someone you could call when it stalled. That side is now mostly software. It captures, matches, and schedules invoices, with no one touching them unless something breaks. It is good for your customer, and it is not going to reverse. For you, the move that used to work, a quick call to nudge a payment along, is gone. The person became a status field, and if you cannot see that field, you are flying blind.

Why does the old AR playbook break?

The old AR playbook rests on two assumptions that no longer hold. It expects a human on the other end, and a single channel to watch.

Both have quietly disappeared. Chasing by phone and email does little when there is no one left to reach. Visibility scatters too, because invoice status now lives across dozens of portals instead of your ERP. And no, your ERP does not close that gap. It marks an invoice as sent, but it cannot tell you whether the portal approved, held, or bounced it. So the status your team trusts is not the one that decides when you get paid. Time goes into manual processing: logging into each portal, reformatting invoices, and re-keying data your system already holds. A rejection can sit unseen for weeks. That quietly stretches your days sales outstanding (DSO) and complicates cash application once the payment finally lands.

This is not an isolated problem. Nearly a third of large B2B suppliers say about a third of their payments now arrive late (Mastercard research, 2026). The teams that pull ahead stop patching a portal world with an email-era workflow. They match their process to how customers actually pay, and shrink the hidden cost of late payments as they go.

What this looks like in practice

Cloudinary is the billion-dollar media company behind the visuals for brands like Levi’s, Hilton, and Atlassian, and it ran straight into this. Its billing team was collecting across 41 different customer AP portals. That meant registering for each one, keeping every profile current, and hand-formatting invoices to each portal’s exact spec. The manual load drove up rejections and slowed payments. They even began turning away enterprise customers who billed through portals, the exact logos they most wanted to keep. After automating the portal work with Monto, Cloudinary cut invoice rejections by 23.5% and, reduced billing time by 66%, and lowered its true DSO by 21%. Same team, same portals, a workflow that finally fits them.

What does modern AR actually look like?

Modern AR meets customers where they now pay and removes the manual work in between, instead of adding headcount to cover more AP portals.

It connects your accounting system to every customer AP portal at once. Invoices get submitted automatically, in each portal’s required format, without anyone logging in. Purchase orders and payment status flow back into one place, so your team sees where every invoice stands across all customers in near real time instead of hunting from portal to portal. The payoff starts with visibility, one clear view of every invoice and payment across every customer, and turns into the numbers that follow it: fewer logins, faster payments, healthier cash flow, and lower DSO.

That is the category Monto sits in. Monto’s AI agents connect your ERP to every customer’s AP portal, submit each invoice in the format that portal requires, and track it through to payment, while your team watches the status across all of them from a single dashboard. The work that used to fill your week runs in the background, and you get the visibility to act on an invoice before it ever goes late.

Signs your AR workflow hasn’t caught up

A quick gut check. If more than one of these sounds familiar, your process is still built for the old way of getting paid:

• You log into a growing list of customer AP portals every week just to submit invoices and check where they stand.
• You find out an invoice was rejected days or weeks after it happened, not when it happened.
• Payments land in the bank but remain unapplied because the remittance details are stuck in a portal.
• Your DSO creeps up on your largest accounts, specifically, the ones that pay through portals.
• Onboarding a new enterprise customer means learning yet another portal by hand.

Where should you start?

You don’t have to rebuild AR overnight. Start by mapping where your top 10 customers actually pay you: how many portals are involved, how many hours your team spends in them each week, and which invoices stalled or were rejected last quarter. That total is usually far bigger than anyone expects, and it tends to make the case on its own.

Then automate in steps, not all at once. Start small, with whatever costs your team the most time and causes the most rejections today, prove it out, and build from there. You don’t need a big rollout to feel the difference, just a first win and the room to keep widening it until getting paid runs quietly in the background.

The way you get paid has already changed, and catching up is achievable. The AR teams that move first are the ones turning the portal era into the most predictable cash flow they have ever run.

FAQ

What are the biggest changes in how B2B companies get paid?

Payment moved from email to your customers’ AP portals, and the buyer’s side became automated. Getting paid used to mean sending an invoice to a person. Now it means submitting inside each customer’s system, in their format, and tracking it through an approval workflow you do not control.

Why do customer AP portals slow down the payment process?

Every portal has its own rules, so a single missing or mis-formatted field can leave an invoice waiting or send it to a rejection queue. Because the status lives inside the portal, a rejection can sit unseen for weeks, quietly stretching your DSO before anyone notices.

How should AR teams adapt?

Stop running an email-era workflow against a portal world. Match your process to how your customers actually pay now, and automate it in steps: start where the manual work is heaviest, prove it out, and widen from there instead of trying to fix everything at once.