The need to reduce complexity and manual workloads within the industry and with the growing impact of artificial intelligence and e-commerce over the past 10-years had led to an explosion in the number of A/R portals on the market. They are both a blessing and a curse for the A/R professional.
Portals came into existence with an intent to reduce manual work within the accounts payable environment, by moving the work into the accounts receivable realm, with an expectation that suppliers uploaded or keyed invoices directly into the portal themsevles. Portals are available 24-hours a day, 365 days a year and allow for status updates as and when required.
The downside of customer portals from a credit & collections perspective is the lack of flexibility when it comes to providing the relevant data. Many require specific data to be available on the invoice and one missing piece becomes a rejection. Without portals, the invoice is in the customers process and you have the chance to provide the information directly to the accounts payable team and have the invoice processed.
There are now hundreds of portals available. The major portals, such as Coupa, Ariba and OpenInvoice are robust and companies can set them up in differing ways. This becomes a one-to-many relationship for credit & collection teams and makes automating the upload process more difficult.
When dealing with customer portals you need to ensure your technology is reviewed regularly. Batch uploads can cause delays in understanding if there are issues with an invoice as rejections are delayed. A one-to-one feed by invoice allows for a quicker understanding of issues that speeds up dispute resolution. You will also need to consider the possibility of accepting data back from portals on an automated basis to avoid the necessity to log into the customer portal and draw down data. An automated feed back to your system with the invoice status allows for a timely turnaround.
Accepting customer portals is becoming a necessity in business. You need to ensure that you are ready and understand the requirements of each portal prior to final agreement and for any Credit Managers, accepting customer portals does not automatically lead to a reduction in resource within your team.
