Building an AR Automation Roadmap: 3 Steps for Maximizing Your Investment

82% of CFOs plan on increasing their investment in accounts receivable (AR) automation over the next 12 months. 

That’s what we learned when we surveyed 400 finance leaders for our 2026 Cash Flow Clarity Report. But AR automation can impact many areas of the receivables cycle, from streamlining invoicing and increasing payment visibility to improving communication across teams and with customers. 

So if you’re planning on initiating or adding to your own AR automation investment through 2026 or 2027, you need to understand where to invest before you even spend a single dollar. This article takes you through key decision-making considerations and what they mean as you plan your investment.

For the best returns on time and budget, finance teams need a roadmap that prioritizes where they want to invest, and when. To build out yours, follow these three steps:

Most accounts receivable teams can identify the biggest points of friction in their accounts receivable processes. These are the areas consistently causing your customers and team the most problems. And by focusing on yours—whether it’s an inefficient invoicing process, trouble collecting payments once they become overdue, or something else entirely—you can align your AR automation investment to create a more seamless process, saving time and money in the long run. 

These are some of the areas you may choose to focus on:

For over half of the respondents we surveyed (55%), tracking invoice status and customer communications was a significant source of friction. Generating and sending invoices was another point of contention for 41% of respondents. This makes invoicing a good place to start when investing in automation. By prioritizing automated invoicing, you take the manual effort out of generating invoices while avoiding challenges caused by manual errors like incorrectly inputted amounts or contact information. Follow-ups and payment reminders can be automated as well, to ensure a consistent cadence of communication.

Applying payments and reconciling accounts were points of concern for 51% of the finance leaders we surveyed. When a payment is applied to its corresponding invoice manually, misapplications and customer disputes can and do result. This can damage the customer relationship and requires more manual effort from your collections team as they try to resolve the issue. Investing in cash application automation helps by: 

• Matching payments to invoices automatically to avoid manually searching for data across inboxes, lockboxes, and paper files
• Reading digital and paper transactions—including wire transfers, automated clearing house (ACH), and checks—to reconcile different forms of payment
• Removing delays associated with matching payments to invoices, for real-time visibility, accelerated cash posting, and fewer exceptions
• Reducing the need for manual data entry, limiting errors, and increasing match rates

Accounts receivable teams often work from a patchwork of systems, including a variety of reports, spreadsheets, and software. This can mean that there isn’t a single source of truth that the entire organization can reference. Communication and collaboration become more difficult between internal teams as a result. It becomes harder to reach agreements on issues like payment disputes, to contextualize collections issues, or to align sales and accounts receivable teams on discounts and payment terms. In turn, this may delay cash flow, while contributing to both a poor customer experience and low employee morale. 

Unsurprisingly, 49% of finance leaders identified coordinating communication between internal teams as a challenge for their organization. By investing in a centralized platform and prioritizing communication among your team, you can help eradicate these issues by: 

• Centralizing customer data, enabling transparency across departments, and allowing teams to track collections progress to better understand cash flow and set targets accordingly
• Tracking sales discounts, so that the receivables team is on the same page as the team offering a discount—often sales—with both understanding who is eligible for those discounts and when to apply them
• Simplifying the dispute management process by ensuring customer-facing teams all have the same set of payment details when trying to resolve invoice discrepancies

When you’re working across disparate accounts receivable systems and manually entering data, data entry errors can also be a point of concern. And when those errors happen—an incorrect dollar amount entered, the wrong invoice number used, or relevant discounts omitted, for instance—customer disputes bloom quickly. This is another concern for accounts receivable teams, with 47% of finance leaders identifying resolving disputes or errors as a challenge. But by focusing your investment on integrating data sources and automating invoice creation and payment reconciliation, you start to remove the need for manual data entry altogether.

Additional findings from our report demonstrate exactly how difficult collections have become:

• 81% of finance leaders say that collecting open invoices has become increasingly challenging
• 69% report that late B2B customer payments have increased over the past 12 months
• 74% say their teams are devoting a meaningful amount of time each week to chasing late payments

That manual effort can put a strain on your collections team, while taking time and attention away from higher-value financial planning and delaying cash inflows.

Implementing an online customer portal, dashboards for internal visibility into customer behaviors, and automated late-payment reminders can take some of the burden off collections teams, building a stronger customer relationship and allowing teams to prioritize and focus on the highest-risk accounts—all while ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.

By narrowing down your biggest points of friction, you’ll begin to understand which processes will benefit most from AR automation. This next step, on the other hand, will help you recognize which AR automation initiatives will earn you the best returns on investment (ROI). ROI is critical for demonstrating the ongoing value of your automation efforts, and will help you justify further investment—letting you continue to build your roadmap going forward.

In our 2026 Cash Flow Clarity Report, for example, 48% of finance leaders named collections and follow-up as an area that provides the greatest return on investment from automation, followed by reporting and forecasting (46%), cash application (45%), and customer communication (43%). The following AR automation initiatives are also examples of projects with strong ROI, and can impact multiple accounts receivable workflows:

A lack of enterprise resource planning (ERP) integrations can hold AR automation projects back from achieving their fullest returns. In fact, 47% of finance leaders cite ERP integration complexity as a top barrier to faster adoption of AR automation. 

With that in mind, integrating your ERP with your payment processing and accounts receivable systems, ecommerce tools, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, business intelligence (BI) tools, and more can go a long way in helping you reap higher AR automation adoption and greater ROI. It helps to create an end-to-end data environment that allows accounts receivable teams to better see what’s happening across their cash flow cycle. Doing so: 

• Unifies data for a clearer view of the invoice-to-payment journey
• Reduces the chance of error from manual data entry
• Provides a single source of truth
• Helps you achieve a clearer understanding of customer behaviors

Our survey results illustrate a shift in customer payment behaviors, with: 

• 79% of finance leaders losing confidence in their cash flow forecasts once payments go beyond 60 days
• 55% reporting that customers are requesting longer payment terms
• 53% saying they’re getting more requests for payment plans 

By prioritizing your automation investment around more reliable cash flow forecasting, you can improve confidence in cash flow assessments even as customer behaviors like these change. When cash timing is more complicated to predict, it becomes more difficult for CFOs to stay flexible and proactive in their spending. But by investing in more dependable cash flow forecasting, accounts receivable teams can better focus their operational plans, ensuring liquidity for critical activities like payroll, supplier payments, and capital projects.

37% of finance leaders expect to adopt predictive analytics within accounts receivable. Using artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze past customer behaviors, predictive analytics allows you to anticipate future behaviors earlier in the receivables lifecycle, and predict which customers are likely to pay and when. 

This allows you to identify payment risk earlier, improve cash flow forecasting, and better prioritize your collections. In doing so, it also lets you personalize your customer communications and customize payment terms and credit management based on risk level. Collections and dispute management become more customer-centered as well, as you’re able to anticipate and plan around behaviors—all of which serve to remove friction and improve ROI.

Self-serve online payment portals give customers control over their own payment journey, centralizing invoices, enabling digital payments, empowering easy customer communications, and allowing access to supporting documentation and transaction histories. This makes accounts receivable more efficient and the customer experience more seamless, while also improving ROI by enabling faster payments and automating cash and account reconciliation. 

But self-serve portals are only beneficial when your customers actually use them. To continue to optimize ROI, also plan to invest time and resources into teaching customers how to use these portals, so that you’re making the most of the benefits they offer.

With 82% of CFOs planning on increasing investment in AR automation over the next 12 months, it’s clear that support for automation is already there. But without the right roadmap, your AR automation journey can stall before it even begins. By mapping out your points of friction and understanding the projects that will earn the largest ROI, you can begin to establish the path that will create the greatest impact and build support for your ongoing efforts.

Before you can put that roadmap into action, though, you’ll need executive approval. So be prepared to state your case for AR automation—demonstrating all the expected benefits, including: 

• Reductions in manual labor
• Operational efficiencies
• Decreases in collections costs
• Customer experience improvements
• Stronger forecasting accuracy 

Beyond these advantages, help your leadership team understand the potential long-term gains as well, including impacts on future hiring plans and borrowing decisions.

Finally, measurement should permeate every stage of your AR automation journey. Map out the metrics you plan on tracking to determine your success going forward. These will help you demonstrate success and recalibrate your investment roadmap to continue to optimize performance and build impact. They may include: 

• Days sales outstanding (DSO), which measures the average amount of time it takes to collect payment after a sale
• Average days delinquent (ADD), which subtracts your best possible DSO from your actual DSO to understand how late customers’ payments are on average
• Collection effectiveness index (CEI), to understand the efficiency of your accounts receivable team in collecting payments
• Cost of collections, which measures the cost of resources expended by your AR department to collect customer payments 

These metrics can be used to demonstrate ROI and validate further investments into AR automation going forward. 

Versapay offers a unified accounts receivable solution that can help you expand your automation efforts—from automated billing and an online payment portal, to AI-powered cash application and automated cash flow forecasting. 

To determine whether a tool will meet your needs before you invest, request a demo and talk to our sales team.