Table of Contents
- Automation Is Delivering Measurable Gains
- What does AR automation mean for finance teams?
- How CFOs are implementing AR automation
Key Takeaways
- Manual invoicing and collections expose companies to delayed payments and margin erosion, leading to cash flow unpredictability and customer dissatisfaction.
- Finance leaders experience measurable ROI from AR automation and reduce payment times by 40%, accelerating working capital and freeing up strategic bandwidth.
- Finance teams spend up to 80% of their time on manual AR tasks, but automation flips that ratio, boosting efficiency, improving accuracy, and enabling strategic analysis.
- CFOs integrate AR automation with their ERP and AI to forecast payments, flag risk, and automate reconciliation, driving proactive decision-making and scalable financial operations.
In a year defined by economic headwinds—persistent inflation, rising interest rates, and market volatility—CFOs are rethinking how they manage cash flow. Accounts receivable (AR) automation has become a strategic imperative, not just a productivity tool. Manual invoicing and collection processes leave companies vulnerable to delayed payments, eroding margins, and compromising forecasting accuracy.
Recent data shows the scale of the issue: 86% of businesses report that up to 30% of their monthly billed sales are overdue in 2025 . That means almost one in three customers consistently pays late. Over half of U.S. B2B invoices now arrive past their due date, a nearly 55% late-payment rate, undermining predictable cash inflow.
These delays aren’t a niche problem. About 81% of companies experience delayed payments on at least 25% of invoices each month, and many face multi-week or multi-month lag times. For CFOs, the result is cash flow stress, diminished working capital, and pressure to secure more expensive credit lines.
Automation Is Delivering Measurable Gains
Automation and digital tools have now become the DNA of the enterprise. But finance and revenue teams, the lifeblood of the organization, still spend a bulk of their time manually processing transactions, sending payments, collecting paper checks, reconciling financial data from different sources, and matching an ever-increasing volume of transactions.
This manual process is not only costly and inefficient, but it also creates layers of risk. For example, errors can quickly happen when you need to reconcile hundreds of thousands of transactions (bank records vs. GL, invoice vs. PO, credit cards, company data, and more). If you're dealing with multiple systems (ERPs, PoS, inventory, etc.), this problem will only get worse.
AR automation isn't simply convenient; it delivers real financial improvements. A recent Vanson Bourne survey of 500 financial leaders showed 100% reported measurable gains after adopting AR automation, and 93% achieved expected ROI . On average, companies reduced payment times by 40%, and 92% confirmed faster cash flow.
PYMNTS Intelligence highlights that automation can cut collection times by up to 67% Yet only 17% of firms have fully automated their collections, leaving a vast majority still relying on inefficient manual processes.
What does AR automation mean for finance teams?
Finance teams have long spent the bulk of their time (up to 80%) on manual data entry, collections, and reporting. That leaves little room for analysis, planning, or strategic advising. AR automation is flipping that ratio. By handing off repetitive tasks to intelligent workflows and AI-powered tools, finance teams gain time and visibility.
Instead of chasing invoices, they’re identifying trends, surfacing risks, and guiding decisions that impact growth. AI also helps reduce human error in core AR processes, from invoice generation to reconciliation, enabling a faster, more precise cash cycle that scales with the business. According to Paidnice, 85% of finance teams using automation report higher efficiency, and 62% note measurable improvements in DSO.
What AR Automation Helps Solve
The macroeconomic backdrop in 2025 remains challenging: high borrowing costs, tight liquidity, and unpredictable market shifts. AR automation creates resilience. Centime’s roadmap identifies AR, AP, and forecasting automation as top CFO priorities in 2025 .
The benefits to your business:
- Accelerated cash flow: Automation shortens the cash conversion cycle by streamlining invoicing, follow-up, and reconciliation.
- Lower transaction costs: Digital payments cost significantly less to process than paper checks, reducing overhead and freeing up working capital.
- Fewer errors, less rework: Built-in validations and automated workflows minimize manual mistakes, prevent duplicate payments, and improve accuracy across your AR process.
- Faster month-end close: Real-time data and automated reconciliation speed up the financial close, helping your team shift from crunching numbers to analyzing results.
- Greater visibility and control: Automated systems capture more transaction data, giving you better insight into payment trends, customer behavior, and cash forecasting.
- Centralized, scalable infrastructure: A unified AR platform eliminates the need for multiple tools. You get a single source of truth for monitoring revenue, customer value, and recurring income.
How CFOs are implementing AR automation
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems like NetSuite, Sage Intacct, Microsoft Dynamics, or Acumatica are still the core systems of record for most finance teams. But for all its strengths, an ERP alone can’t fully support the agility or automation modern finance requires, especially across AR and AP.
CFOs are increasingly finding that while their ERP consolidates data, it doesn’t give them the tools to act on it in real time. AR teams still send out invoices manually. AP teams still rely on paper-based approvals or outdated vendor portals. Cash flow visibility often lags by weeks, and payments—both incoming and outgoing—are fragmented.
To close these gaps, finance leaders are extending their ERP investments with automation platforms designed specifically for receivables and payables.
Here’s what forward-thinking CFOs are doing:
- Integrating AR and AP automation tools directly with their ERP to eliminate manual data entry, ensure two-way sync, and reduce reliance on spreadsheets.
- Embedding payment options into digital invoices to speed up collections and offer customers flexible, low-cost ways to pay.
- Automating approval workflows in AP, enabling faster invoice matching, exception handling, and vendor payments.
- Leveraging AI to forecast payment timing, flag at-risk accounts, and surface patterns that would otherwise go unnoticed.
- Closing the books faster by automating reconciliation and gaining visibility into real-time working capital.
For CFOs earlier in the journey, here’s a starting point:
- Audit your AR and AP cycles: Where are the delays? Where are people still moving paper or sending emails to follow up?
- Assess your ERP’s integration ecosystem: Many ERPs already support plugins or APIs, like Paystand, that make AR automation possible without a major IT project.
- Start small: Focus on digitizing a single process, like invoice delivery in AR or expense management in AP, and measure the impact.
- Use AI where it matters: Predict payment delays, improve vendor cash flow planning, and surface anomalies without extra manual effort.
The benefits of this financial revamp are significant and can save companies millions of dollars a year in transaction fees, human capital, and errors or delays. And with AI layered on top, CFOs can turn finance into a forward-looking function that informs strategic decisions, not just tracks historical ones.
AR Automation is the CFO's key to unlocking growth and improving both the predictability and scalability of the business. More insight into cash flow means more ability to forecast and plan for what's to come. And, the path to automation doesn’t require a complete system overhaul. It’s about extending the tools you already trust with the capabilities you need to operate faster, smarter, and more strategically.
That's why now, more than ever, we're seeing forward-thinking CFOs and companies turning to process automation in Finance to help steer the business forward with confidence.
