Getting cash in the door and applying it to open balances is mission critical. Fast cash application gives your business the cash it needs — and frees up customer credit.
Top 3 cash flow challenges
Multiple payment methods
Gathering buyer payment information is tedious and time consuming, requiring suppliers to access multiple sources, and lacks a single centralized source for all customer payments and remittances regardless of delivery format or method.
Remittances don't arrive with payments
ACH payments and remittance advice do not arrive together. For example, payments could arrive from ACH email, virtual credit card, or paper check. The payment hits your bank, while the remit is emailed or must be retrieved from a portal. This is more manual work!
Manual cash application
AR teams are manually keying remittance data into their ERPs by hand — adding hours or even days to cash application. As an AR department scales operations, manual processes become unscalable.
Billtrust rebuilds processes with automation
Billtrust’s Cash Application empowers customers to process and apply any payment regardless of how it is sent, whether by ACH, check, wire, card or AP portal.
Our solution is the only cash application tool on the market that simplifies your most complex customer payments by taking large, complex remittance data from disparate sources and standardizing it for easy and automated cash application.
Key Billtrust Cash Application features
- Digital lockbox: a single inbox for electronic payments
- Industry-leading remittance extraction: ACH emails, Bank AP systems
- Emailed virtual credit card processing
- Standardization of electronic remits
- Automatically correlate digital payments to remittances
- Paper check lockbox integration
- Confidence-based matching engine
- Automated deductions
- ERP integration
Why confidence-based matching wins
Confidence-based matching engines give users control, and designed to work well with messy data. That’s why it’s perfect for cash application.
Rule-based matching works best with enormous, accurate and consistent data- sets. It’s not as effective for cash application. And it ends up being more expen- sive to implement because changes require expensive time with developers.
Meanwhile, our confidence-based engine goes beyond learning from your behavior. You can easily modify the weighting that each category has in the overall confidence score. And you can also raise or lower the threshold required to make a match based on your observations of exceptions being flagged by the system.
All exceptions will come with tentative matches made by the engine. If you observe that your current confidence score threshold for a match is 90%, but there are many exceptions with correct tentative matches scored at 88%, the threshold can be easily lowered.
| Criteria | Rule-based matching | Confidence-based matching |
|---|---|---|
| Making changes to matching rules | Optimization can be slow and expensive because every change requires a developer. Can lead to a situation where AR teams accept a sub-optimal configuration. | Self-service capabilities allow changes to be made in minutes, not days. Most critically, rules can be easily added after implementation. |
| Optimizing match rates | Requires the intervention of a developer, either a contractor hired by the AR team, or someone from the solution provider. | Self-service and machine learning power constant evolution in the matching engine, ensuring that it is always moving towards its most optimal state. |
| New customer setup | Requires new rules to be written and developers to do so. |
New customers can be onboarded with simple self-service changes and machine learning optimization. |
| Complex relationships | Complex parent / child relationships amid customers can require custom rules be written for each relationship. | Even if names and customer numbers differ, other elements that the matching engine looks for can still lead to correct matches without custom programing. And exception handling activities automatically improve that engine's recognition of parent / child relationships. |
| Ease of exception handling |
Exceptions may be organized by rules they have violated, but they will not show suggested matches. |
Every unmatched invoice and payment is still assigned a Match Score. If it’s in the exception queue, then the Match Score isn’t above the confidence threshold for an automatic match. But it will still suggest the best match, which can make exception handling easier. |
The Digital Lockbox
Billtrust offers a first in cash application: the Digital Lockbox. It’s a single destination for all of your digital payments. The Digital Lockbox is an email address where your buyers can send (or where you can redirect) their automated clearing house (ACH) remittance advice and virtual card payments. Billtrust Cash Application automatically processes and applies virtual card payments and retrieves ACH remit info and matches that data to payments hitting your bank.
Make digital payments easier for cash application
Billtrust has developed an expertise in running email and phone campaigns on behalf of our buyers to convert their customers to paying digitally. We create custom email templates and phone scripts and leverage proprietary data to run effective campaigns. This makes cash application easier because we reduce manual work and lockbox fees for processing paper checks. Learn more about how we can help you meet your electronic payments goals and improve your cash application process.
Achieve industry-leading straight-through processing with machine learning
Billtrust Cash Application utilizes a dedicated machine learning model. The solution focuses on:
- How your team uses your ERP
- Your buyers’ payment patterns
- Your customers' invoices and remit data
With a smarter solution, higher levels of automation and greater accuracy become available to your team.
Faster, happier cash application teams
Exceptional exceptions processing
Process exceptions twice as fast as other solutions (average of 40 exceptions per hour).
Friendly interface
User-friendly UI allows for complete training in a single day – accelerating onboarding.
U.S.-based support
Local, U.S.-based customer support teams ensure same-day issue resolution in most cases.
Fewer errors
Automation reduces errors that slow down work and require backtracking.
Fast matches, exception handling and workflows
The Billtrust Cash Application automated solution offers the highest match rates in the industry. Funds and remittance data from disparate customer channels are automatically matched and applied at the invoice line item level within your ERP, even if remittance information is missing or incomplete. Intelligent exception handling provides smart suggestions that bring resolutions in a few clicks.
Work smart from anywhere
Our Cash Application platform can work on any device and is browser-based, which means your team can efficiently work their queue from their homes without further stressing scarce IT resources. Managers have a centralized view across their team and can dynamically reprioritize workflows based on business needs and productivity. Crucially, the tool allows managers to remotely monitor productivity across their team and get ahead of any trends that may slow cash application. For cash application departments that are struggling with uneven staffing and system access, Cash Application can help you stay on top of your workflow and reduce manual data entry.
Download Solution Guide
Learn how to stay on top of your workflow and reduce manual data entry with the Billtrust Cash Application automated solution.