By Joel Campbell, Chief Financial Officer at TreviPay
Accounts receivable (A/R) occupies an important but misunderstood function in most organizations. Finance teams know it matters for cash flow, yet often treat it as routine back-office work. According to industry research, 85% of firms still rely on partially manual A/R operations. This persistence of manual processes reflects a common misconception: A/R keeps the lights on but doesn’t move the strategic needle.
This is an expensive and risky way of thinking for CFOs. When the A/R function isn’t seamless and automated, finance teams can’t extend trust, optimize order-to-cash or create competitive resilience. It creates friction at every stage of the buyer-supplier relationship – invoices arrive in the wrong format, payment routing gets confused, and Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) is extended. Meanwhile, working capital is tied up in receivables that could have funded growth.
From my experience, three blind spots prevent finance leaders from recognizing A/R as a strategic driver of growth, customer loyalty, and working capital efficiency. Heading into a new year, this is a great time to change the narrative.
Blind Spot #1: Missing the Connection Between Invoice Accuracy and Customer Loyalty
Many finance teams view A/R through an internal lens focused on departmental efficiency: how quickly can we process transactions, how much does it cost per invoice, and can we close the books faster?
Buyers see it differently. From their perspective, A/R and the entire order-to-cash cycle shape how easy you are to work with as a business partner. Incorrect invoice formats, billing-entity mismatches and missing purchase order references are frequent sources of error. Taken together, they create avoidable friction in commercial relationships.
Suppliers who eliminate this friction and focus on enhancing the payments journey see a significant increase in buyer retention, with revenue per customer growing incrementally over time. We’ve seen retaining a business buyer for seven years can lead to a 150% increase in revenue per customer, jumping to 240% after ten years.
As a global customer experience leader noted at a recent payments salon in New York, “Transformation efforts and technology optimizations do not get maximized in part because they didn’t put the people they serve at the absolute center and build around them.”
To do this, trade credit remains one of the most effective loyalty tools in B2B commerce. Companies should offer flexible payment terms for invoice payment and deliver invoices in the buyer’s preferred format. When you layer on AI-enabled or zero-touch A/R, buyer alignment is further strengthened, as there’s less payment friction. Intelligent systems automatically reorder invoice data to match buyer purchase order templates or validate the correct billing entity before invoices reach customers. These seemingly small adjustments prevent rejections and payment delays across millions of transactions, materially affecting working capital.
The payoff operates on two levels. Operationally, you get paid faster with fewer disputes. Plus, your most valuable customers direct more spending toward you because you’ve removed obstacles other suppliers haven’t addressed. This relational advantage compounds over time, but it starts with getting the basics right at the invoice level.
Blind Spot #2: Accepting Payment Delays as Normal When They’re Destroying Working Capital
Payment delays feel normal because they are widespread. Retailers commonly negotiate 120-day terms, while manufacturers typically operate on 60- to 90-day terms. When everyone in your sector deals with extended terms, payments that stretch beyond those terms start to feel like part of the landscape. For 86% of businesses, up to 30% of their monthly invoiced sales remain overdue. Finance teams routinely see 20% to 30% of receivables sitting more than 30 days past due.
Here’s where invoice accuracy connects directly to working capital efficiency. In an environment with elevated interest rates, each delayed dollar increases the cost of capital. The question becomes: how much of that delay stems from disputes, rejections and routing errors that accurate invoicing would prevent?
Companies with intelligent A/R processes can reduce past-due receivables. The improvement stems from accuracy at the source. Invoices go out complete, correctly formatted and routed to the correct destination within the buyer’s organization. Fewer errors mean fewer disputes. Fewer disputes mean faster payments. Faster payments mean more reliable forecasting and better working capital management.
Research from McKinsey shows that companies that integrate predictive analytics into order-to-cash processes improve working capital efficiency by 30% or more within a matter of weeks. The magnitude of improvement doesn’t come from working harder at manual processes. It comes from eliminating the friction causing delays in the first place.
A 45-day average collection period might feel acceptable when the industry standard is 60 days. But if intelligent A/R can get you to 30 days while also reducing the variance in timing, you’ve unlocked an advantage.
Blind Spot #3: Stopping at Efficiency When AI Enables Prediction
The third blind spot is framing automation purely as a cost reduction project when it enables predictive intelligence that manual operations can’t match. Research shows that 86% of businesses regularly deal with up to 30% of monthly invoiced sales arriving late, yet only 3% accurately identify red flags in customer payment behavior. This gap exists because manual A/R processes cannot detect patterns at scale that AI systems automatically flag.
Consider early indicators of customer financial distress: a buyer who typically pays invoices in full suddenly submits a round-number payment ($7,000 against a $10,897 invoice), or a customer who consistently used ACH suddenly switches to paper checks. These behavioral shifts often signal cash flow pressure.
When AI systems flag these patterns automatically, finance leaders can act preemptively to tighten credit exposure before losses mount, adjust payment plans or re-prioritize collection efforts.
This predictive capability transforms how finance teams operate strategically. The shift begins by reframing automation as a growth enabler. Finance teams using intelligent A/R can leapfrog competitors by learning from aggregated transaction data across industries and regions, continuously improving with each payment cycle. It also frees finance talent to focus on growth initiatives rather than data entry and payment matching.
Next Steps for Finance Leaders in 2026
As volatility persists into 2026, finance leaders need a concrete plan that goes beyond incremental efficiency gain, placing reliability and trust at the center of financial operations. Here’s what I suggest:
1. Start with an assessment of current A/R friction points: Identify where friction points exist in current receivables processes, which customer relationships risk strain under existing credit terms and where manual intervention creates delays or errors. This baseline reveals the highest-impact automation opportunities and guides prioritization of technology investments that integrate with existing ERP systems while remaining flexible to customer needs.
2. Build trust and alignment into invoicing before it becomes a friction point: Integrate A/R systems directly with key buyers to align invoice formats, data structures and delivery requirements upfront. Reducing friction at the source strengthens reliability and creates smooth partner interactions, keeping payment behavior steady even when markets tighten.
3. Shift from reactive collections to proactive partnership management: Implement automated credit risk monitoring with behavior-based scoring to identify at-risk customers early. Deploy predictive analytics that flag at-risk accounts early, allowing proactive engagement when support matters most rather than when relationships are already strained.
4. Establish metrics that measure both performance and relationship durability: Track DSO compression, on-time payment rates and reductions in manual touches, and pair these with indicators of relationship durability under stress and whether removing friction improves payment discipline over time. These signals often reveal resilience before traditional metrics do.
In today’s environment, where every day of working capital counts, intelligent or zero-touch A/R automation delivers an essential layer of predictability. Manual, slow and resource-intensive processes no longer serve modern finance teams. Automating A/R lays the foundation for stable cash flow, enabling companies to collect what they’re owed on time, every time, while redirecting finance talent toward growth initiatives. As more suppliers modernize their A/R operations, those who delay will face a widening competitive gap.
About the Author
Joel Campbell leads TreviPay‘s financial and treasury operations, financial controls, statutory accounting, financial planning and analysis and process improvement initiatives to optimize order-to-cash with TreviPay’s fully managed B2B payments platform. Joel has more than two decades of domestic and international financial expertise and a deep understanding of payments and capital markets. He joined TreviPay in 2020.