Payment lags are extremely frustrating, especially when you’re responsible for managing cash flow at an accounts receivable (AR) department. A weak accounts receivable process can come with a whole plethora of unintended (and potentially catastrophic) consequences, including:
- Errors on bills and invoices
- Incorrect payment allocation
- Writing off outstanding receivables as bad debt
- Missed follow-ups on overdue invoices
When these consequences snowball, they can have devastating impacts within your organization — ranging from a production and ops slow down, to missing revenue targets while your competitors continue to expand and grow, and of course, a host of dissatisfied and frustrated customers.
But there’s light at the end of the tunnel! Supplier portal automation can help you optimize invoicing, facilitate B2B payments, streamline cash application, and keep your customers happy.
Here are the top 4 ways supplier portal automation improves your AR processes.
1. Supplier portal automation ensures accuracy
Inaccurate invoicing is a massive pain point for several businesses. It results in delayed payments, dissatisfied customers, and a needlessly prolonged cash conversion cycle. Supplier portal automation can help fix that! It:
- Integrates with your existing accounting software, removing the need for error-prone manual data entry.
- Further reduces the risk of human error by automatically populating invoices with relevant customer information, and guarantees that invoices are generated on time, with accuracy and consistency.
- Schedules recurring invoices (and instantaneous payments) for regular clients, reducing administrative burdens on accounts receivable teams.
Monto’s supplier portal automation process translates to on-ground impact for your business. It integrates into your supplier portal like magic, so you can focus on your business and not billing. It also has a smooth and easy ERP setup and a smart engine that learns on the go, ensuring that all your invoices are verified and nothing is wrong or missing.
Case study example
Cloudinary was founded in 2012 by three developers who wanted to give brands a fast and flawless way to upload, manage, and deliver thousands of images, videos and other media content at scale.
When we met their team, they were struggling to collect payments across 21 different AP portals. Their billing team was manually registering for each portal and continuously updating their profiles. They were also manually submitting invoices to collect millions of dollars from portal customers — which was extremely time consuming, boring and error-prone work.
With Monto’s supplier portal automation system, Cloudinary was able to transition from manually submitting invoices to collect millions of dollars from portal customers, to a fully automated system. This helped Cloudinary decrease invoice rejections by 23.5%! Without having to waste time manually creating and submitting invoices, the team is also experiencing less data entry errors and have more confidence they’ll collect payments on time, every time. Read their success story.
2. Multiple supplier portals = chaos
We all know that too many cooks spoil the broth. Similarly, multiple supplier portals lead to total chaos. Invoices are paid late, sometimes even lost, and manual processes are inefficient and error-prone, placing an overall dent on operations. Late payments inevitably hurt your company’s cash flow, and B2B companies often write off 8% of invoices that are past due by more than 90 days.
Supplier portal automation helps solve these problems by ensuring your accounts receivable process doesn’t crumble under the weight of high volume supplier invoices.
- Automating B2B payments happens to be one of the key accounts receivable best management practices, improving payment collection and making the accounts receivable process more efficient.
- It helps streamline invoice processing, reduces errors and enhances overall operational efficiency.
- It caters to a myriad of payment methods — ranging from credit cards to ACH and wire transfers.
- It also provides customers with flexible payment options, such as partial payments, payment plans, or early payment discounts. These features improve overall customer satisfaction, as well as cash flow.
Case study example
When we started working with AppsFlyer three years ago, they had hundreds of customers across almost 50 external portal – and all of these portals had unique logins and configurations.
This was creating an impossible amount of manual work for AppsFlyer’s accounts receivable team. They were manually creating invoices, downloading them, and entering them into portals to match purchase orders. After submitting invoices, the team had to track hundreds of open invoices at any one time and talk to customers through different portal interfaces.
Not only did this mean each employee in the AR team had to be meticulously trained on the intricacies of each portal, it meant invoices were regularly rejected due to manual errors.
Here’s where Monto came in. With our supplier portal automation system, we helped the team simplify their AR process from managing 50 different portals to only managing one. With a one-click process, Monto allows AppsFlyer to create zero-touch payments through every AP portal, gain full visibility into the activity on these portals, and stay up-to-date with customer information. Read their success story.
3. Streamline cash application processes
The cash application process involves matching incoming payments with outstanding invoices. Often, this process can be time-consuming and error prone when performed manually. Supplier portal automation leverages AI and machine learning to streamline this process, ensuring accuracy and timely matching of payments with invoices.
Supplier portal automation and an automated cash application process helps streamline the accounts receivable process by:
- Matching payments to invoices based on predefined patterns and sequences, reducing the need for accounts receivable teams to manually intervene.
- Using machine learning and artificial intelligence to learn from historical data and improve the accuracy of the cash application process over time.
- Integrating with bank feeds and apps to automatically import and cross-check incoming payments, eliminating the need for tedious manual entry.
4. Build better relationships with your customers
Transitioning to a supplier portal automation system allows AR teams to focus more on strategic tasks rather than repetitive, time-consuming ones. A great example is AR teams being able to dedicate more time to bridging existing communication gaps with customers — truly the need of the hour, especially given that studies claim that 80% of CFOs believe their AR departments aren’t customer-oriented enough.
All in all, a supplier portal automation system helps pave way for stronger customer relationships. It streamlines and improves the accounts receivable process by:
- Allowing AR teams to collaborate across verticals within your organization — since they’re no longer bogged down with the task of manually inputting thousands of invoices before the end of the month.
- Reducing the need for constant manual intervention, supplemented by automated reminders and follow-up communications.
- Giving back AR teams more time in their day to spend with the most important people in your business – your customers.
At Moto, we believe you should get paid on time, every time. With supplier portal automation, you can make sure that prompt payments are the least of your worries.
