A messy or disorganized AR (accounts receivable) process slows cash flow, creates stress, and ruins your relationship with customers.
Identifying the problem is the first step. It can be one or several pain points affecting your AR and stifling your company’s growth – and blame may not fall solely on your customers.
This blog details some common pain points that harm a company’s AR process and how accounting automation solves them.
It’s typical to blame your customers if payments constantly arrive late. However, your own AR process may be the problem. This is especially true if everything is done by hand and invoices are sent out individually. The longer it takes to send an invoice, the harder it is for customers to hit a due date.
Batch invoicing, available with some AR automation platforms, is a time saver. You can send multiple invoices, and your customers can pay multiple invoices, at the same time. This expedites billing, payments, and collections. Within minutes, your customers have access to accurate, payment-ready invoices.
As payments roll in, AR automation immediately matches them to the corresponding invoice, accelerating cash flow and ensuring nothing falls through the cracks. For example, payments handled manually may be reconciled incorrectly. Or payments may not be reconciled at all and marked as missing, falsely inflating your DSO (Days Sales Outstanding), or the amount of time it takes your company to get paid. This could create a rift between you and your customers. Because AR automation is scalable, it automatically reconciles payments with accuracy and efficiency no matter how many invoices you reconcile as your company grows.
Late payments
Customers have to pay on time. But it’s not that simple if your process is clunky, riddled with mistakes, and overly reliant on accepting checks.
Accounting automation streamlines your entire AR process by automatically creating clean, correct invoices that are easy to read. It eliminates manual mistakes because it reduces manual labor.
A majority of today’s B2B buyers were born after 1980 and expect a modernized payment process that’s easy and quick. AR automation enables them to use self-service portals and set up and store banking and card information in digital wallets.
This makes bill pay as simple as just clicking a button – and far safer than paying by check. You and your customers can also turn on AutoPay, where you draft recurring fees from your buyers’ preferred method of payment. You’re guaranteed to get paid on time, and your customers have one less deadline to remember. Invoice emails can also be embedded with “pay now” links that allow customers to forego their digital wallet and pay immediately.
With AR automation providing customers with modern, digital payment options, they’ll have no excuse not to pay you on time.
Too much friction for buyers
It’s one thing to provide customers with top-shelf products and services. But today’s B2B buyers are looking for more – Jobera reports 54% consider the buying experience a key differentiator when it comes to choosing a vendor.
Rather than simply easing the payment process, AR automation eliminates friction and guesswork by enabling customers to chat with you in real-time through their self-service portal. Their questions are answered immediately without your customers growing frustrated with chatbots and outsourced answering services.
Whether it’s a question about the due date, pricing, or other crucial information, you can quickly provide customers will the answers they need to ensure they pay you on time. You get paid faster while providing buyers with a personalized level of service they can’t get anywhere else.
Bill360 Solves Specific Pain Points
Before launching Bill360, our executive team spoke with more than 2,000 representatives from B2B companies to learn what they wanted from AR automation software. That’s why our embedded platform combining e-invoicing, auto reconciliation, and payment processing gets B2B companies paid an average of 36% faster than their current process.
Looking to integrate AR automation? Download our latest interactive toolkit that includes a checklist, self-evaluation worksheet, and a step-by-step process that ensures you choose the platform that best suits your B2B company.