Electronic invoicing

Small businesses still process a large number of transactions and can fall behind if there are delays, says Valtatech's Jussi Karjalainen.

Compassionate billing, transparency and digital processing can all improve conditions for providers and patients, says Cedar's Florian Otto.

In order for suppliers to recover and prepare for future growth, it’s critical to understand the complex nature of the corporate cash cycle, says AvidXchange's Denise Leleux.

As executives continue to navigate business strategy decisions to deal with dramatic changes in supply chains, proper communication and strong supplier relationships is widely considered a prerequisite when exploring P2P risks, says Practis' Jan van der Pouw.

Robotic Process Automation and other cognitive automation tools can handle repetitive manual tasks such as processing data from websites and other applications says Kofax's Wendy St. Clair.

Payment technology provider Patientco has agreed to provide billing communication and payment tools to nonprofit health care organization network BJC Healthcare.

Nobody knows what the next six to 12 months are going to look like. That means AP needs to focus on conserving cash while keeping operations moving, says Nvoicepay's Josh Cyphers and Derek Halpern.

Duplicates can take many different forms and can be difficult to find in a manual review process, says AppZen's Josephine McCann.

Making the case for process optimization is a lot harder, however, because the costs are hidden and hard to measure, says Nvoicepay's Kristin Cardinali.

AvidXchange is expanding its outreach to lenders with its purchase of BankTEL, which currently does business with 20% of U.S. banks.

AI-focused venture fund Radical Ventures is the lead investor in a $31.5 million Series B round in Sensibill, which boosts it overall financing to $46.5 million. National Bank of Canada is also part of the investment round.

Fintechs and payment startups are creating a range of solutions to SME financing, from crowdlending and invoice-backed factoring to digitalization and formalization of business processes, according to OmniBnk's Andrés Abumohor.

E-invoicing is the solution to unlock early-payment discounts, but many businesses are stuck in the past, according to Roger Hatfield, vice president of North America for CloudTrade.

Banks are making business customers happy with new digital billing services as machine learning meets the lockbox.

Buyers who rely on paper-based payments often struggle to onboard new suppliers. This "process overhead" can be so cumbersome that many buyers become resistant to change, opting instead to limit their supplier choices to a small number of partners, writes Patrick Bermingham, the CEO of Adlex.

Payment data can also reveal insights for companies to foster better relationships with customers and vendors or suppliers, writes Matt Clark, president and COO of Corcentric.

When taken in the context of the complete invoice and payment cycle, manual payments not only have higher processing costs to the provider and supplier, but also result in delays between processing and making payments, writes Darci Guerrein, vice president of payment operations for GHX.

Commercial customers, including small businesses, seem ready to pay up to shift to faster, more sophisticated electronic invoicing and payments, and enterprising banks that provide them the technology to do so could find it lucrative.

SMBs are choosing virtual cards as their preferred form of electronic payments because they solve many of their payment challenges, while also helping them avoid the costs associated with custom software solutions designed for larger businesses, writes Blair Jeffery, COO of Noventis.

Using an automated solution to process virtual card payments is the first step in overcoming the challenges of this payment technology, writes Ed Jordan, CFO of Billtrust.