These tools are designed to accelerate collections, improve buyer payment experiences and provide AR teams with earlier cash flow visibility, the company said in a Tuesday (May 5) press release.
Billtrust’s new Buyer Payment Portal allows buyers to view invoices, manage balances, enroll in Autopay, make payments with multiple methods, and receive guidance on capturing early-pay discounts, avoiding surcharges and optimizing payment timing.
For suppliers, the portal enables AR teams to manage payment methods, branding and access without submitting support tickets.
Lee An Schommer, chief product officer at Billtrust, said in the release that the company built the portal “to actively guide buyers toward the actions that benefit both sides of the transaction, while giving AR teams their time back.”
Another new tool from Billtrust, the Cash Forecast analytics capability, generates a 13-week AR cash forecast based on Billtrust payment activity, invoicing data and a daily open AR balance file, per the release.
An agentic layer monitors buyers’ behavioral signals, notifies finance teams when material changes occur, and provides the projected cash impact broken down by week.
“By analyzing live buyer payment behavior across all receivables activity on the Billtrust platform, not limited to a single ERP or payment channel, Cash Forecast helps finance leaders see changes sooner, understand exactly what’s driving them and plan with greater confidence,” Schommer said in the release.
PYMNTS reported in April that while AR has long been run as a back-office chore, it is now expected to chase delinquency on buyers more frequently.
Augmenting ERP systems with purpose-built AR platforms can improve cash flow, reduce days sales outstanding and shift finance from reactive tracking to proactive decision-making, Schommer told PYMNTS in an interview posted in March.
“The ERPs are always going to be the system of record. Their core strength is financial transactions. AR solutions, they’re the intelligence layer,” Schommer said.
“Shifting from process automation to more predictive intelligence” is the next step, she said.
Companies need systems that can “start predicting cash flow, predicting disputes, understanding where there’s risk, and then helping you proactively manage it,” Schommer said.